Downtime cost: Why reliability and robust delivery are non-negotiable

In my house, Sunday night is movie night. With two young kids, it’s a great way to wind down and relax before a hectic week — everyone looks forward to it, and it almost always centers around streaming a movie online.

A few weeks back, we sat down with our ice cream and started the app, only to be greeted by the dreaded infinite loading screen. Chaos ensued. There were tears, spilled ice cream, and a total loss of our much-needed wind-down time.

Having worked in software for the last 18 years, I’m deeply familiar with the business and technical impacts of a service outage, but that never felt more real than in this moment.

Downtime costs companies millions. For example, Delta estimated losses to be $500 million during the CrowdStrike outage. But immediate revenue loss is only the tip of the iceberg.

In this post, we’ll look at the average cost of downtime in dollars and in terms of business impact and reputational damage — the loss of trust when you leave customers stranded or their kids in tears.

You’ll learn the root causes that increase the risk of a disastrous downtime event, and steps you can take to reduce downtime and save the day for your company and your customers.

The average cost of downtime

Have you ever thought about what an hour of downtime might cost your company? The number will vary depending on the nature of your business, but odds are it's a lot.

In its annual survey, Information Technology Intelligence Consulting found that 90% of respondents estimated that an hour of downtime costs $300K or more, with 20% putting the cost at over $5 million per hour.

A Siemens report breaks down the average cost of downtime further by sector. Companies in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector came in at the low end, with an average hour of downtime costing $36,000, while companies in the automotive sector lost an estimated $2.3 million per hour of downtime. 

The cost of downtime extends beyond lost revenue

The cost of downtime goes beyond immediate revenue loss and extends to indirect costs, including recovery costs, lost productivity, regulatory fines, legal fees, and customer attrition. The following data from Splunk, a Cisco company, shows the business disruption downtime recovery causes marketing teams.

Downtime lowers customer lifetime value

Splunk also found that 40% of CMOs believe downtime impacts average customer lifetime. 

This isn’t surprising given how quick customers are to seek better experiences with other brands. In a 2025 Survey, 24% of consumers said they would leave a brand after one bad experience. After two bad experiences, that number jumps to 70%.

And consumers don’t go quietly. In 2024, a relatively small outage on black Friday sparked social media backlash for Costco. Spotify saw similar user outrage during a 2025 outage.

Downtime on a single channel can also impact other channels. One study found that failure of a mobile app impacted in-store shopping, “leading to short-term revenue losses of up to $1.08 million, with an additional $1.89 million in potential long-term revenue erosion due to customer attrition over time.”

Understanding the different types of downtime

Downtime can be planned or unplanned. Planned downtime includes things like a freeze on content updates while replatforming, taking a system offline for updates, or taking a website down for maintenance. Unplanned downtime is what it sounds like: downtime that is unanticipated. 

Downtime can also affect frontend accessibility (your website and other customer-facing experiences), backend management (when your systems are inaccessible), or both. It’s easy to see how a website crash on Black Friday hurts revenue, but losing access to critical backend systems can be just as costly — imagine not being able to push a time-sensitive campaign live.

Key terms:

• Planned downtime: When a system is unavailable for scheduled maintenance, upgrades, or other planned activities.

• Unplanned downtime: When a system crashes unexpectedly or with little lead time.

• Frontend access: The availability or uptime of customer-facing components like your website, mobile app, or point-of-service kiosk.

• Backend access: The availability or uptime of critical business systems like servers, your CMS, accounting software, customer management system, and any system that affects your ability to do business. 

Address your biggest downtime risk factors 

Downtime might seem unavoidable, but companies can take steps to reduce the risk of unplanned outages and eliminate the need for planned downtime. Let’s examine the root causes of downtime and how you can address them.

Risk: Dated infrastructure

On-prem infrastructure or dated cloud services require a lot of manual work to keep updated. This leaves them prone to human error.

Solution: Upgrading to managed, purpose-built infrastructure reduces the risk of human error and relieves internal teams of some responsibility.

Contentful provides fully managed infrastructure built for content delivery at scale. Our team of infrastructure experts handles everything from low-level patches and threat mitigation to delivering your content and media via proven global CDNs, allowing you to focus on higher-value tasks that go way beyond just keeping the lights on.

Risk: Inability to scale quickly

There are many types of scale to consider, from traffic, data, and usage spikes to complex use cases and changing security needs. Failure to scale on any of these measures can crush the momentum of Black Friday sales, Super Bowl campaigns, or viral moments.

Solution: In the old days of infrastructure management, scaling to demand meant physically adding more computers that could handle the load imposed by your business. That got simpler and more efficient with modern cloud technologies, but still requires manual work and the challenge of trying to predict the unpredictable. These variables often lead to costly outages in moments that should be the most profitable for your business. 

This is where Contentful’s modern, autoscaling infrastructure saves the day — in both planned and unplanned traffic spikes, our team has already done the legwork to ensure that any load your Super Bowl campaign or cultural flashpoint imposes will be handled with ease.

Risk: Weak links in your tech stack

Your system is only as strong as its weakest link. It’s critical to choose the best tools for every aspect of your business to ensure seamless, uninterrupted experiences across channels.  

Solution: Composable architecture is built around the idea that your business doesn’t have to settle for an all-in-one solution that does a few things well, but comes with technical baggage that requires you to compromise in many other areas. Contentful brings best-in-class content delivery, personalization, experimentation, and page building, on top of a modern, resilient, managed infrastructure to ensure you get the best tools for the job without compromise.

Case Study: A composable platform enabled Pets Deli to try something new on Black Friday

Black Friday is a tricky day for retailers. You want to do something exciting to bring customers streaming in, but you don’t want your site to crash under the strain. Just eight weeks before Black Friday, Pets Deli decided to improve the customer experience by delivering personalized experiences that would reduce or eliminate the need for promo codes.

Because Pets Deli was using Contentful as a composable platform, they were able to quickly integrate a top personalization tool in time to launch a Black Friday personalization campaign that boosted conversion rates 51%. Contentful helped them seamlessly handle Black Friday traffic and deliver a delightful customer experience that was a cut above competitors. 

Actionable steps to prevent downtime

Now that you understand the underlying causes of downtime, let’s look at how you can minimize downtime and avoid downtime costs.

• Improve the reliability of your tech stack: Build a tech stack composed of reputable SaaS platforms with proven experience that aligns with your business goals. Specifically, look at data that speaks to how each platform effectively autoscales for high-traffic events.

• Communicate what’s at stake: Quantify what you stand to lose if you experience a critical outage. Consider all the costs and use that to justify investing appropriately to prevent outages. For mission-critical applications, look for things like 99.99% uptime service level agreements (SLAs), 24/7 global support with a minimum response time of one hour on critical tickets, and the ability to run on multi-region infrastructure that reduces your recovery time objective (RTO) to five minutes in the event of an outage.

• Plan for the worst-case scenario: Don’t just hold your breath and hope an outage never happens. It will, and when it does, you need to be ready to work through it with reliable partners who know exactly how to minimize the impact on your business. Build strong relationships with your account team, keep the support contact information handy, and understand who/when/what to escalate.

Reliable infrastructure is non-negotiable  

We are in an increasingly competitive digital world, vying for the attention of customers with high expectations who are willing to switch brands to get a better, more reliable customer experience. Brands must ensure that their systems work flawlessly, especially during critical moments — big promotions, viral moments, checkout, interactions with customer support, handoffs between channels, etc.

Investing in a better platform and modern technology might seem like an expense, but it can save you millions in lost revenue and reputational damage. 

Modern platforms like Contentful free developers from systems maintenance so they can focus on revenue-generating work. They empower marketing teams to build dynamic experiences, integrate personalization and localization, and connect everything across channels and throughout the customer journey — without worrying that they might break something or cause a crash.

How much bigger and bolder could your brand be if you knew your platform was reliable and ready to handle any use case or viral moment? Chat with one of our experts to see how Contentful can provide the reliability you need without painful replatforming or downtime.

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