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Q & A Security · September 3, 2026

What are the main causes of unplanned enterprise downtime?

ITIC’s cause-attribution data across recent survey years has been broadly stable: security incidents (roughly 40% of unplanned downtime), human error (35–40%), third-party or vendor issues (30–50% with overlap across categories), and hardware/software failure (25–35%). Certificate-related outages fall inside the security-incident and third-party categories — see the certificate outages statistics analysis for how 86% of enterprises hit one in the past year alone.

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Enterprise Downtime Costs $300K/hr — And Why That's a Floor
Cost of downtime is the single most-abused number in security-budget requests. It's also one of the most rigorously measured. ITIC's 2024 survey pins the median mid/large enterprise at over $300K/hour; the top of the industry table clears $5M/hour. Here's how the number is built, why Gartner's $5,600/min baseline still holds up, and how to calculate your own.
Related questions
How do I calculate my own hourly downtime cost? How does Gartner's $5,600/minute figure compare to ITIC's data? What counts as downtime cost in these reports? What is the current benchmark cost of one hour of downtime? Why is the $300K/hour figure called a floor and not a ceiling?