How much does 1 minute of downtime really cost your company?
A business-focused read: revenue, productivity, SLAs, hidden costs… and how to reduce the real impact of outages.
One minute, that’s nothing… until everything stops
It’s 2:37pm on a Tuesday. Your core business app stops responding. Orders pile up in carts without being completed. Your sales teams stare at frozen screens. Customer support starts receiving the first worried calls. And you watch the clock tick.
You’ve probably heard that one minute of downtime costs “between €5,000 and €10,000.” It’s a striking number—often quoted, rarely explained. But this kind of average hides a much more complex reality, and in many cases, a far more expensive one than you expect.
Because downtime cost isn’t limited to lost revenue. It affects productivity, brand trust, contractual commitments, and even your ability to retain customers. Let’s break down the myth of the “average cost,” show you how to calculate your real cost, and how to reduce it significantly.
The “average downtime cost” myth
“Downtime costs X thousands per minute.” You’ve likely seen it in analyst reports or internal decks. The problem: it means nothing for your company.
There isn’t one downtime cost—there are multiple costs depending on context. A minute of unavailability doesn’t have the same impact for a retail website during a sales peak, a B2B SaaS platform on Monday morning, or a manufacturing line running at full speed. Sector averages hide radically different realities.
Company size matters too. A 20-person SaaS startup and a large enterprise don’t have the same transaction volumes, contractual constraints, or remediation costs. Comparing them makes no sense.
Finally, application criticality changes everything. A CRM outage for 10 minutes on Sunday night may be negligible. The same incident on your payment platform in business hours can be catastrophic.
So let’s stop talking about an “average downtime cost” and start understanding what your downtime costs in your context.
Why 1 minute of downtime is getting more expensive today
Hyper-connected systems
Modern architectures rely on third-party APIs, cloud services, microservices, and SaaS integrations. You gain agility—but you also create domino effects. When your payment gateway fails, it’s not just checkout: recurring billing, refunds, subscription renewals, and order workflows may all be affected.
Users are less tolerant
Customers compare your experience—consciously or not—to always-on platforms. A few seconds of slowness can drive abandonment. A few minutes of unavailability triggers support waves and social media noise. Repeated incidents can damage your reputation long-term.
Digital is now the business
Ten years ago, IT supported operations. Today, IT is operations. Sales, support, production, logistics—everything runs on software. One incident can stop the company, not just a server.
What 1 minute of downtime really costs: the 5 key components
1) Lost direct revenue
The obvious part: transactions that can’t complete—e-commerce orders, SaaS sign-ups, leads that don’t convert, payments blocked. But beware averages: peak periods can multiply the cost by 10+.
2) Lost internal productivity
How many people are blocked? For how long? If 50 employees with a loaded cost of €50/hour are stuck for one hour, that’s €2,500 in productivity lost—before counting context-switching and recovery time.
3) Contractual penalties and SLAs
If you’re a service provider, SLAs can trigger automatic credits or penalties. Even without formal penalties, downtime creates commercial debt: negotiations, extensions, compensations.
4) Remediation costs
Incident response is expensive: on-call engineers, overtime, vendor support, emergency cloud scaling, restores, data checks, post-mortems, communications… A “short” incident can generate days of work.
5) Indirect and delayed costs
Often the biggest: brand damage, customer trust erosion, churn, support overload, and IT burnout/turnover. These costs are harder to measure, but very real.
How to calculate downtime cost for your company
Lost revenue = (Average hourly revenue × duration) adjusted by peak periods & conversion context.
Lost productivity = impacted employees × loaded hourly cost × duration (+ ~30% recovery time).
SLA penalties = service credits + negotiated compensations.
Remediation = overtime + on-call + external vendors + infra overconsumption + post-incident workload.
Long-term impact: pragmatic approach—estimate 20–50% of direct costs for isolated incidents, and up to 200% for recurring incidents that damage trust and drive churn.
Tip: compare two scenarios systematically—minor incident (partial degradation, off-peak) vs critical incident (total outage, peak moment). The cost ratio can be 1 to 50+.
Real-world examples: downtime cost by industry
E-commerce
For a mid-size e-commerce site, one minute of downtime might cost €100–€500 in direct revenue—multiplied by 10–15 during peaks. Reputation impact is immediate: customers switch instantly.
B2B SaaS
The real cost is often customer productivity and trust. Downtime can impact renewal decisions and churn, representing large annualized revenue losses (ARR), even if immediate revenue loss seems small.
Manufacturing / Industrial
Here, downtime cost equals production loss: idle labor, stopped lines, missed deadlines, penalties. In connected factories, 30 minutes can cost tens of thousands depending on the activity.
Financial services
The stakes are highest: missed trades, payment failures, regulatory obligations, potential sanctions, and severe trust damage.
Reducing downtime cost: where it really happens
Detect earlier
The earlier you detect degradation, the cheaper it is. Invest in modern observability: business metrics, real user experience monitoring, synthetic journeys, and early warning signals.
Diagnose faster
Teams often spend most of the resolution time finding the root cause. Unified visibility across metrics, logs, traces, and user impact can cut diagnosis time dramatically—and help prioritize by business impact.
Reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution)
Cost is proportional to duration. Cut MTTR by 50% and you halve incident cost. Use runbooks, automation, and impact-driven prioritization.
The real problem isn’t downtime—it’s not knowing its cost
Downtime is part of digital life. No system is 100% fail-proof. The difference between companies that suffer and companies that lead is the ability to measure, anticipate, and act.
This isn’t just an IT topic—it’s a business topic. When leadership understands that one hour of downtime costs €50,000, investing in observability, resilience, and automation becomes obvious.
Measure what each minute costs in your context, map applications by business criticality, invest where financial risk is highest, and track performance using business-aligned indicators: revenue impact, productivity impact, and customer impact.
What’s expensive isn’t the outage. It’s not knowing what it costs.