IT downtime

IT downtime costs more than the outage window.

Cost of IT downtime covers more than servers — network, ERP, CRM, helpdesk, and employee productivity all go on the bill. Enter affected systems, revenue or productivity impact per hour, MTTR, incident frequency, and SLA target.

cost of IT downtime IT downtime cost calculator cost of network downtime cost of system downtime employee productivity loss

Calculate IT downtime cost Where cost hides

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InputsIT ops model

Systems affected servers, apps, endpoints

Impact per system hour revenue + productivity, USD

MTTR hours per incident

Incident frequency events per year

SLA target availability percent

Estimate SLA breach risk

Annual downtime cost

Hidden outage tax: $0

Direct loss $0

Hidden tax $0

0h Annual outage time

0h SLA budget

0h Budget overrun

Where it hides

IT downtime cost is rarely just the outage.

For internal systems, the biggest line item is often not lost revenue — it is idle employees, backed-up helpdesk queues, and manual workarounds that outlast the incident itself.

Idle headcount

When ERP, CRM, or core line-of-business apps go down, employees are often fully blocked, not just slowed — their loaded hourly cost runs the entire time.

Helpdesk backlog

A single outage can generate a multi-day ticket backlog, extending the effective cost window well past the technical recovery time.

Manual workaround tax

Falling back to spreadsheets, phone calls, or paper process introduces error rates and rework that show up in the weeks after, not the incident report.

FAQ

Cost of IT downtime, answered.

Questions IT managers and CIOs ask before presenting a downtime cost figure internally.

What counts as IT downtime? Any unplanned unavailability of systems employees or customers depend on — servers, network, SaaS applications, ERP, CRM, and internal tools, not only customer-facing infrastructure.

How is cost of IT downtime different from server downtime cost? Server downtime cost usually focuses on revenue-generating infrastructure. IT downtime cost is broader, including internal productivity loss, helpdesk load, and workaround costs even when no customer-facing revenue is directly affected.

How do I estimate the productivity impact input? A simple starting point is affected headcount multiplied by average fully loaded hourly compensation, for the share of their work that is fully blocked by the outage.

How does this relate to website or customer-facing downtime cost? They are complementary. See cost of website downtime for the customer-facing, revenue-first view, or the full annual model for the general case.

Your annual outage exposure is $0.

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