8th Annual Report analyzes data on IT and data center outages including causes, frequency, costs, and consequences
Uptime Institute today announced the release of its 8th Annual Outage trends report, an ongoing series from Uptime Institute Intelligence analyzing IT service resiliency. Outage prevention continues to be a central focus for data center operators as demand growth, AI-driven workloads and power constraints reshape risk profiles. As design and operations improve, operators must still navigate greater system complexity, grid instability, deeper interdependencies and evolving external threats. The 8th Annual Outage Analysis 2026 report analyzes recent data on the causes, frequency and consequences of IT and data center outages.
For the fifth consecutive year, Uptime Intelligence Research suggests that outage frequency on a per-site basis is declining. However, the pace of improvement has slowed compared to previous years and approximately 1 in 10 note their last outage had serious or severe impacts.
In publicly reported outages, external infrastructure failures are becoming more prominent. Also, outages linked to fiber and connectivity issues are rising and more likely to result in extended disruptions.
“Outages overall have slowed down, and overall, digital infrastructure is remarkably resilient. But further resiliency gains are becoming harder to achieve,” said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Intelligence. “We believe that over time, failures will increasingly not be the result of a single point of failure, but instead be linked to complex interactions between systems, including software, networks, and external dependencies. While site based electrical and mechanical infrastructure remain a critical building block that needs to be resilient, digital infrastructure is becoming more distributed with outages originating outside the data center, including those tied to power availability, network connectivity or the reliance on external cloud services playing a larger role.”
Uptime’s annual outage analysis is unique in the industry and based on data from a variety of sources, including publicly available reports (e.g., information reported in news and social media), Uptime surveys (such as the Annual Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey and the Uptime Institute Data Center Resiliency Survey 2026). This information is further supplemented with information from Uptime Institute members and partners, and its database of publicly reported outages.
Key Findings Include:
- For the fifth consecutive year, outage rates on a per-site basis are declining. However, the pace of improvement has slowed.
- External infrastructure failures are becoming more prominent in publicly reported outages – possibly indicative of a long-term trend foreseen in Uptime predictions. Outages linked to fiber and connectivity issues are rising and more likely to result in extended disruptions.
- Outage costs continue to edge upward. In Uptime’s 2025 Annual Survey, 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. For the second consecutive year, 1 in 5 reported costs exceeding $1 million. Around one in ten say their last outage had serious or severe impacts.
- Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, but the risks are evolving. Failures involving UPS systems, transfer switches and generators are dominant; however, worsening grid constraints and high-density workloads are introducing new pressure points.
- Operators are adapting investment strategies toward automation and control systems to manage complexity, while resiliency assessments remain more focused on internal systems than on external and systemic risks. However, more automation can cause different classes of problems.
For 2026, failures to follow established procedures remain the leading driver of human error-related outages. Issues such as inconsistent or unclear processes are also common, alongside installation and in-service errors.
Over the nine years that Uptime has been tracking publicly reported outages, third-party IT and data center service providers — including cloud and internet giants, telecommunications, and colocation companies — have accounted for about two-thirds of those reported. This reflects a structural shift in the industry that may still require further adaption at a contractual and financial level.
