The $10M downtime disaster

A single hour of IT related downtime costs Australian businesses between $500,000 to more than $10 million, a third of local organisations said in a survey.

Most of that eye-watering amount was due to a loss of revenue, respondents to the PagerDuty research said.

More than half of respondents – made up of more than 200 IT personnel in development and operations – noted that their organisations experience customer-impacting incidents (slowness or downtime) at least one or more times a week.

Fortunately then, 39 per cent of organisations said they were able to get consume-facing digital services back up and running within 15 minutes of an incident. Nearly a third were able to do so within an hour.

Some 16 per cent of companies took up to a day to solve issues.

The survey, which also included interviews with 300 Australian consumers, showed just how impatient users are when it comes to sluggish apps and online services.

More than three quarters of consumers said they leave a digital app or service in one minute or less if it is unresponsive or slow. Issues around reliability, speed and security were listed as the top reasons consumers stop using a website or mobile application to complete tasks.

Despite the negative experience outages create for customers, less than half (44 per cent) of organisations made an effort to contact those affected.

And internally, only 21 per cent of organisations prioritise informing business stakeholders after a disruption occurs. The most common course of reaction was instead to ‘develop new code and roll out updates’ (45 per cent).

Respondents said sales, research and development, and accounting and finance were the business units most impacted by IT operational issues.