Uptime Says 23% of 2024 Outages Stemmed From IT, Network Complexity
Updated
Updated · InfoWorld · Jun 12
Uptime Says 23% of 2024 Outages Stemmed From IT, Network Complexity
2 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Jun 12
Summary
Uptime Institute’s latest outage analysis says impactful cloud outages are increasingly driven by software, networking and process breakdowns rather than failed hardware, marking a structural shift in how major incidents happen.
23% of impactful outages in 2024 came from IT and networking issues, which Uptime ties to growing system complexity, third-party dependencies, misconfigurations and change-management failures.
10 percentage points more outages in 2025 were linked to human failure to follow procedures than in 2024, and an industry summary said 58% of human-error outages involved staff not following established processes.
Power still leads as the single biggest cause of major outages, but Uptime says redundancy alone cannot contain control-plane errors, bad configuration changes or automation failures that can cascade across cloud services.
54% of respondents in Uptime’s 2024 analysis said their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000, while 20% put losses above $1 million, underscoring pressure on providers and customers to strengthen resilience planning.
Cloud outages cost millions per incident. Are businesses truly prepared when their cloud provider suddenly fails?
As cloud outages shift from hardware to human error, is our digital world becoming too complex to manage safely?
With AI now managing cloud crises, are we trading human mistakes for more catastrophic machine errors?
IT Outages in 2024: Key Trends, Financial Losses, and the Path to Digital Resilience
Overview
In 2024, IT outages are increasingly driven by the exponential growth of data, which overwhelms legacy infrastructure not designed for such scale. As older systems struggle to keep up, performance bottlenecks emerge, raising the risk of significant downtime. This challenge is made worse by ongoing supply chain disruptions, a lingering effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which force organizations to delay essential maintenance and upgrades. These interconnected factors—rapid data growth, outdated technology, and postponed improvements—combine to create a complex environment where IT outages remain a persistent and costly threat.