Direct labor
The affected people, multiplied by the hours stopped, multiplied by their loaded hourly cost.
Cost of downtime
Downtime has a price. Most companies have never calculated their own.
Generic industry statistics rarely match a specific company. This is a framework for estimating your own exposure from your own team size, pay rates, and dependencies-not a claim about what downtime costs “businesses like yours.”
Five cost categories
What an outage actually touches.
Delayed revenue or delivery
Client work, invoicing, or fulfillment that cannot proceed while the disruption continues.
Recovery labor
The hours spent diagnosing and restoring, on top of the hours already lost to the original outage.
Relationship cost
A client or vendor commitment missed or visibly delayed, separate from the direct financial impact.
Recurrence risk
The same failure happening again without a fix, compounding every category above.
Build your own estimate
A rough number built on your own history beats a borrowed average.
This page does not publish an industry-wide downtime cost figure. An estimate built on invented averages is less useful than a rough number built on your own team and history.
- List the roles affected by a typical disruption and their approximate loaded hourly cost.
- Estimate a typical outage length from recent experience, not a guess.
- Note which of the five categories above genuinely apply to your business.
- Multiply the direct-labor figure by how often this pattern repeats in a year to see the recurring cost, not just one incident.
Where managed IT changes the calculation-and where it cannot.
What it can change
Proactive maintenance and a clear escalation path reduce how often small issues become full stops, and a documented recovery process shortens the recovery-labor category above.
What it cannot promise
No managed service can promise zero downtime, eliminate every dependency outside its scope-like an ISP or software vendor outage-or guarantee a specific recovery time without a written commitment.
Connect the work
Compare your estimate to what a managed plan costs.
Reach the team
Tell us what needs an owner
Share your team size, current support setup, and the responsibilities you want clarified. We will use that to figure out whether an MSP introduction makes sense.
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