Per-Minute Benchmarks
Cost of Downtime Per Minute - 2026 Benchmarks
Updated April 2026 · Sources: Ponemon 2022, ITIC 2024
Small Business (<50 staff)
$427
per minute · Ponemon 2022
Mid-Size (50-500 staff)
$9,000
per minute · Ponemon 2022
Large Enterprise (500+ staff)
$23,750
per minute · ITIC 2024
Why Per-Minute Cost Matters
Per-hour figures are what CFOs use in budget meetings. Per-minute is what matters at 2am when your on-call gets paged. The difference between a 15-minute outage and a 45-minute outage is not trivial: for a large enterprise at $23,750/min, that 30-minute delta costs $712,500.
Peak-moment amplification is the other reason per-minute matters more than it appears. An e-commerce outage during the Black Friday peak hour can cost 10-50x more per minute than the same outage on a Tuesday morning. Amazon historically loses approximately $220,000 per minute during major outages - but that figure is based on average load; during a peak shopping event it is far higher.
Per-Minute Cost by Industry
| Industry | Per Minute | Per Hour | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance (large banks, peak) | $155,000 | $9300K | ITIC 2024 |
| Healthcare | $116,667 | $7000K | Protenus 2024 |
| Ecommerce (peak) | $33,333 | $2000K | Industry estimate |
| Manufacturing (automotive) | $38,333 | $2300K | Industry research |
| Large Enterprise (avg) | $23,750 | $1425K | ITIC 2024 |
| SaaS (mid-size) | $9,000 | $540K | Ponemon 2022 |
| Media / Streaming | $3,333 | $200K | Industry estimate |
| Small Business (avg) | $427 | $26K | Ponemon 2022 |
Finance and healthcare figures include regulatory/compliance penalties. Ecommerce and manufacturing are peak-load estimates. ITIC 2024 covers large enterprises (>500 employees). Ponemon 2022 covers mid-size and SMB.
Source Comparison
| Source | Figure | Year | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gartner | $5,600/min | 2014 | General enterprise, survey-based |
| Ponemon Institute | $9,000/min | 2022 | Data center outages, mid-size firms |
| ITIC 2024 Survey | $23,750/min | 2024 | Large enterprises 500+ employees |
| Parametrix / CrowdStrike | ~$10,000/min | 2024 | Fortune 500 aggregate during CrowdStrike outage |