Data Center Benchmarks
Cost of Data Center Downtime
Updated July 2026 · Sources: Ponemon Institute / Emerson (2016), Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis (2026)
Direct Answer
The average cost of data center downtime is $8,851 per minute (about $531,000 per hour) and $740,357 per incident, per the most recent Ponemon Institute / Emerson study, which surveyed 63 US data center facilities. That study is dated 2016 and has not been refreshed, so pair it with the more current Uptime Institute trend below: one in five major outages now cost more than $1 million. For a facility-specific figure, model your own revenue and workforce in the calculator.
Per minute
$8,851
Avg unplanned outage, Ponemon 2016
Per incident
$740,357
Avg total cost, Ponemon 2016
Max recorded
$2.41M
Highest single outage, Ponemon 2016
What Counts as Data Center Downtime
Data center downtime is a facility-level failure: power, cooling, network fabric, or hardware in a physical site goes down and takes the workloads running on it with it. That is a different scope from application or website downtime, where a single service fails while the facility keeps running.
The distinction matters for cost. The Ponemon / Emerson figures include equipment damage, detection and recovery labor, and business disruption across every tenant of the affected facility. Survey figures like Gartner's $5,600 per minute or ITIC's per-hour enterprise ranges measure a single organization's lost revenue and productivity. That is why the data center per-incident number runs into six and seven figures: it is the blast radius of the whole building, not one app.
The Ponemon / Emerson Trend (2010 to 2016)
| Study Year | Cost Per Minute | Avg Cost Per Incident |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $5,617 | $505,502 |
| 2013 | $7,908 | $690,204 |
| 2016 | $8,851 | $740,357 |
Source: Ponemon Institute / Emerson Network Power, "Cost of Data Center Outages" (2016 edition, 63 US facilities). Per-incident cost rose 38% from 2010 to 2016; the maximum recorded outage rose 81% to $2,409,991. This study has not been updated since 2016, so it is the last published edition of this specific per-minute benchmark.
What the Current Data Shows (Uptime Institute 2026)
Because the Ponemon per-minute figure is now several years old, the best current reference for direction of travel is Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis. The 2026 edition (published May 2026) reports:
57%
of operators said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000
1 in 5
said it cost more than $1 million (second year running)
5 years
of declining per-site outage frequency, even as per-incident cost rises
Power
remains the single most common cause; fiber and connectivity failures are rising
The paradox in the data: better engineering means fewer outages per site, but denser cloud, grid, and connectivity dependencies make each remaining outage more expensive. Fewer, costlier incidents is the trend for the modern data center.
How to Estimate Your Own Facility Cost
An industry average is a starting point, not your number. A facility running latency-sensitive transaction workloads costs far more per minute than one running batch analytics. To build a defensible figure:
- 1.
Sum the revenue that flows through the workloads in the facility, then divide to a per-minute rate.
- 2.
Add the fully-loaded cost of the staff blocked during the outage, plus the recovery and overtime labor the Ponemon figure captures.
- 3.
Layer in equipment damage risk for power and thermal events, which is what pushes facility outages above app-level outages.
- 4.
Compare the result against the $8,851/min reference to sanity-check your model.
The downtime calculator runs this model for you across eight inputs, and the per-minute benchmarks page breaks the numbers down by company size and industry.