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Per-Minute Benchmarks

Cost of Downtime Per Minute - 2026 Benchmarks

Updated June 2026 · Sources: Pingdom, Ponemon 2016, ITIC 2024

Small Business (<50 staff)

$427

per minute · Pingdom

Mid-Size (50-500 staff)

$9,000

per minute · Ponemon 2016

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's own FY2025 net sales of $716.9 billion work out at about $1.36 million a minute - but that is an average across every minute of the year, and during a peak shopping event the instantaneous rate is far higher.

Per-Minute Cost by Industry

IndustryPer MinutePer HourSource
Finance (large banks, peak)$155,000$9300KITIC 2024
Healthcare$116,667$7000KProtenus 2024
Ecommerce (peak)$33,333$2000KIndustry estimate
Manufacturing (automotive)$38,333$2300KIndustry research
Large Enterprise (avg)$23,750$1425KITIC 2024
SaaS (mid-size)$9,000$540KPonemon 2016
Media / Streaming$3,333$200KIndustry estimate
Small Business (avg)$427$26KPingdom

Finance and healthcare figures include regulatory/compliance penalties. Ecommerce and manufacturing are peak-load estimates. ITIC 2024 covers large enterprises (>500 employees). The $9,000/min mid-size figure is the Ponemon 2016 data center outage average ($8,851/min); the $427/min small-business figure is the widely cited Pingdom benchmark.

Source Comparison

SourceFigureYearCoverage
Gartner$5,600/min2014General enterprise, survey-based
Ponemon / Emerson$8,851/min2016Data center outages, 63 US facilities
ITIC 2024 Survey$23,750/min2024Large enterprises 500+ employees
Parametrix / CrowdStrike~$10,000/min2024Fortune 500 aggregate during CrowdStrike outage

Frequently Asked

What is the average cost of downtime per minute?
Average downtime cost per minute is $427 for small businesses (Pingdom), about $9,000 for mid-size organizations (Ponemon 2016 data center average, $8,851/min), and $14,056 to $23,750 for large enterprises (ITIC 2024). Finance sector peaks at $155,000 per minute for large banks during high-load periods.
What is the highest downtime cost per minute ever recorded?
Per-minute figures are almost always a division of annual revenue, so do it yourself. Amazon reported $716.9B of FY2025 net sales, about $1.36M a minute averaged across the year and far higher at peak; Amazon has never published an outage cost. For the 2021 AWS us-east-1 outage, AWS disclosed no cost and no analyst firm published one, so no aggregate per-minute figure exists for it. The CrowdStrike 2024 outage is the exception: $5.4B across US Fortune 500 companies over roughly 8 hours (Parametrix), averaging about $11M per minute across that population.
Why does downtime cost per minute vary so much by industry?
Per-minute cost varies by revenue density (financial transactions vs subscription billing cycles), employee dependency on IT systems, regulatory penalties that stack on top of base costs, and customer churn sensitivity to service interruptions. A financial exchange down for one minute loses all trading revenue from that minute. A SaaS company down for one minute loses a fraction of one month's subscription revenue, which may partially recover.

Related

Full Cost Calculator

8 inputs, industry-calibrated

Cost Per Hour

Per-hour benchmarks by industry

Data Center Downtime

$8,851/min facility-level cost

Benchmark Sources

All research cited and dated

Updated 2026-04-27