Singapore – The annual cost of unplanned downtime for Global 2000 companies has risen to US$600b, up 50% in the last two years, according to new research released by Splunk in partnership with Oxford Economics.
The study found that outages now cost organisations an average of US$15,000 per minute and contribute to annual revenue losses of around US$95m per company, alongside impacts on customer retention, regulatory exposure, and shareholder value.
“Downtime is inevitable; prolonged disruption is not,” said Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM, Splunk, a Cisco company. “The most resilient organisations are not the ones with the most tools or the biggest vision for AI. They are the ones that align technology with business outcomes, empower people with context, and design systems that bend, but do not break, under pressure.”
The research found that technology leaders are increasingly concerned about the broader consequences of outages. Public disclosure of a data breach was identified as one of the most disruptive hidden costs, with 71% of technology executives describing it as very or prohibitively disruptive, compared with 23% in 2024.
The study also outlined several business impacts linked to downtime. Organisations now face an average downtime cost of US$15,000 per minute, while companies experience an average 3.4% decline in stock price following an incident. Customer losses were also cited as a major issue, with 81% of technology leaders reporting customer churn as a consequence of downtime. Nearly half said customers are often the first to detect service disruptions.
Ransomware-related costs have also increased, with average payouts reaching US$40m, nearly three times higher than in 2024. Regulatory fines averaged US$51m per organisation, while operational pressures continue to grow, as most technology leaders reported increased staffing and customer support demands during outage recovery efforts.
The report also highlighted the connection between cybersecurity and downtime. About 36% of security leaders said downtime incidents are frequently misclassified as IT issues, potentially delaying responses to cyber threats. Only 38% of technology executives reported consistently identifying the root cause of downtime incidents.
The frequency of cybersecurity-related downtime linked to SaaS and third-party applications has also increased, with 56% of security leaders saying they encounter such issues often or very often.
At the same time, organisations are investing more heavily in artificial intelligence tools to improve resilience. The study found that companies spend a median of US$24.5m annually on AI systems designed to prevent and respond to outages.
According to the research, organisations identified as “AI Workflow and Triage Experts” reported stronger resilience outcomes. Around 74% of these organisations avoided publicly disclosing a data breach in the past year, compared with 54% of non-expert organisations. They were also nearly three times more likely to report never losing customers due to downtime.
Despite these gains, concerns around AI-related risks remain. All surveyed technology leaders said their organisations had experienced some form of AI-related downtime, while 68% expressed concern that AI agents could behave unpredictably.
The report also found that companies with lower downtime costs placed greater emphasis on end-to-end visibility across their technology environments. Nearly all organisations in this category said comprehensive visibility was very or extremely important in reducing incidents.
Investment priorities are also shifting, with many IT operations and engineering leaders focusing on observability, automation, and AI-driven security tools to strengthen infrastructure resilience and reduce human error, which the study identified as the leading cause of downtime across technology systems.
