“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,” said Andy Lawrence, founding member and executive director, Uptime Intelligence, in a statement.
According to Uptime’s survey data, half of operators reported experiencing an impactful outage within the past three years, down from 74% in 2020. However, about one in 10 respondents said their most recent outage was serious or severe. Uptime analysts said that stable outage rates do not necessarily indicate lower operational risk. As organizations run increasingly critical workloads across interconnected environments, even isolated incidents can trigger broader service disruptions across cloud, networking, and application infrastructure, according to Uptime.
“Digital infrastructure is remarkably resilient,” Lawrence said during a webinar discussing the findings. “But further resiliency gains are becoming harder to achieve.”
Power failures are the leading cause of data center outages
Power failures continue to dominate data center outage causes, accounting for 45% of impactful outages in Uptime’s latest survey data. While that figure declined from the previous year, it remains significantly higher than any other category.
