Every business requires a stable IT infrastructure. It doesn’t really matter what your business is about. You could be selling detergents in assorted fragrances, but to do it successfully, you must have up-to-date technology that helps run your e-commerce smoothly and make your products accessible to your consumers.
Website/app downtime is an inevitable tragedy while running a digital business. You cannot avoid it (try googling the number of times Meta, AWS, and other major tech companies experienced an outage just last year. The results are astonishing!) and many large brands have learnt it the hard way.
Enterprises of all sizes experience an outage, even with all their highly-functional site reliability engineering. Everyone knows it causes a massive amount of inconvenience and financial loss, but do you know exactly how much a company is bound to lose on an average due to an unattended website downtime?
The cost of downtime varies significantly across different trades. However, the fact remains that it affects every business tremendously when one is not technologically armed against it.
How much does a website downtime actually cost?
One might think an unexpected outage is an IT issue when in reality it affects your finances more.
An excellent example of the above statement is the 2017 British Airways downtime, triggered by a data center glitch, that compelled the company to cancel more than 400,000 flights and led to a whopping $112 million loss in less than two days. Another incident is the 14-hour outage in March 2019 which cost Facebook (now Meta) approximately $90 million!
To get a rough approximation of the downtime costs, one can employ the formula below:
Cost of outage = minutes of outage x cost-per-minute
Close to 45% of the large companies claim that an hour of unexpected downtime leads to a loss of $1 million (for some it can even go up to $5 million!) excluding the legal fines and other penalties. Another close 90% of the companies say that a mere hour of a system outage that drags crucial equipment and applications offline causes about $300,000 loss of revenue, apart from the other productivity interruptions and the efforts put into recovery.
System downtime can quickly translate to a PR horror if not dealt with immediately. A lot of businesses get a rude shock when the reality of the hourly downtime costs dawns upon them. For instance, even a 20-minute downtime affecting two important servers can simply total the loss up to $200,000-$500,000, even without any incidence of data loss or theft. And the costs can easily triple when there is a breach of data.
Therefore, it is essential that companies meticulously evaluate every time they are ambushed with an outage, along with calculating all the relevant fiscal expenses; the effect on the organization’s productivity and recovery strategies. They must also gauge the impact it has on their clients (cyber-attack, loss of productivity, etc) and other partners, making sure that they are kept in the loop regarding the ETA.
You can cut down heavily on the financial loss incurred by an unexpected website downtime by staying ahead of the game with the help of website monitoring services provided by platforms like Awakish. With Awakish, you get instant alerts anytime your e-commerce suffers downtime, anywhere across the globe. You also get comprehensive monthly insights to help optimize your company’s growth. For more info on the services and pricing, contact our support team.