Website Downtime: Causes, Risks, and Solutions

You’re on your couch at 2:00 AM, and your developers get a phone call that the website is down. Orders aren’t going through, the support inbox is full of “Is your site down?” emails, and a marketing manager is quietly going crazy about the ad spend they have running and sending visitors to a blank screen.

This story happens more than many business owners think it does — and at a higher cost each year. Research by Splunk and Cisco called “The Hidden Costs of Downtime 2026” reports that some average organisations in the world today lose $300 million annually in revenue due to unplanned downtime and that the Global 2000 companies are paying about $600 billion annually for downtime combined – a 50% increase over the last two years.

When downtime occurs in your e-commerce website, in your SaaS platform, or in your corporate website, it is more than just an inconvenience to IT; it is a real risk to your business and has a real cost associated with it. Let’s look at the fundamentals of the cause of downtime and the actual cost of that downtime, and then we will help you avoid the downtime in your business.

What Causes Website Downtime?

1. Server and Hardware Failures

Websites all require some sort of physical infrastructure, such as servers for data storage or web applications. Since servers are machines, they can break down for many reasons. Various components wear out, hard drives can fail, or the power shift can happen at a bad time. In 2022, regarding website outages due to power; according to the Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis report, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) failures accounted for 43% of data centre outages. Hardware and storage failures accounted for the majority of the rest of the downtime incidents.

2. Human Error 

The second biggest challenge to keeping websites up and running is human error.

The primary contributor to an outage is people, not technology. Some examples of human errors that cause outages are configuration errors, hurried deployments, or a user typing the wrong command. One such well-known incident happened in 2017 when an employee at Amazon made a mistake and caused an outage. Numerous industry reports indicate that human error continues to be an important contributor to outages and security breaches. According to reports prepared by The Uptime Institute, 40% of significant outages in recent years resulted from errors made by humans.

3. Cyberattacks, especially DDoS

Cybercriminals do not necessarily have to hack into a system to disrupt it; they can launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to flood the server with a massive amount of fake traffic, preventing actual users from accessing the site. The number of DDoS attacks continues to rise. According to reports by Cloudflare, 20.5 million DDoS attacks were blocked in the first quarter of 2025. Not only are these attacks technically disruptive, but they can also result in significant downtime and recovery costs for businesses of all sizes.

4. Traffic spikes 

Many businesses would love to go “viral.” Unfortunately, this can result in a website crash because of the increase in traffic. An effective marketing campaign or promotional events such as flash sales or media coverage will cause (in some cases) an instant spike in customer visits within a short time frame. If the infrastructure of the business has not been properly designed for rapid scalability, the flood of customers could cause the server to crash, resulting in customers being unable to purchase from the site, instead seeing error pages.

5. DNS and deployment problems

Even when there is no visual evidence of an outage (like alarms), it does happen; for example, you may see that a website is up and operational yet cannot access it (for example, because the domain or DNS configuration has expired). An expired domain, a misconfigured DNS setting, or a software deployment gone wrong can cause a website not to be accessible to its users but take longer to identify than a server failure because they occur behind the scenes and may not appear to be an actual outage. While not as dramatic as a server crash, if these types of outages aren’t found and corrected in a timely manner, they can have a similar impact.

What Downtime Actually Costs You

Gartner has been providing enterprise-level benchmarks for many years, and their estimate for the average costs of downtime at a large enterprise would be around $5,600. In ITIC’s 2024 survey, 90% of mid-sized to large enterprises reported costs of hourly downtime to exceed $300,000, with 41% noting losses exceeding between $1 million and $5 million per hour.

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), however, while the pain is less, they still experience significant losses due to downtime. Micro-businesses with fewer than 25 employees have average downtime costs of around $1,670 per minute, and all SMBs are likely to experience at least $100-$5,000 per hour in direct losses from downtime, not including the indirect effect of lost customers.

Indirect costs are generally the greater concern, as lost customers who do not come back can multiply direct losses by 1.5-3x. A public outage can significantly erode the trust built up in the months or years prior, and search engines will also notice when a website is frequently unavailable — quietly damaging search rankings. The costs associated with downtime are also compounded by needing to give out refunds, SLA penalties, handling added support tickets, and utilising engineering hours in fire-fighting rather than in building – so the “real” cost of an outage will typically be 2-3x that of a simple calculation of revenue loss.

How to Protect Your Website

The upside is that almost all of your site’s unplanned outages could be avoided using low-cost or no-cost solutions.

• Invest in Proactive Monitoring Solutions – Utilising third-party solutions that monitor your site from multiple locations around the world every 30-60 seconds for issues will allow you to catch issues before your customers do. The sooner you identify an outage, the lower the financial impact from a given event will be.
• Utilise Quality Scalable Hosting Solutions – This is not the place to cut corners. Most of the incidents that occur due to traffic spikes occur as a result of insufficiently provisioned hosting infrastructure.
• Implement DDoS Protection and a Web Application Firewall – The volume of DDoS attacks is continuing to rise every quarter. DDoS protection has become a standard requirement when implementing perimeter security.
• Automate and Regularly Test Backup Solutions – If you have never tested a backup solution, you cannot depend upon that solution in an emergency.
• Create and Document an Incident Response Plan – Knowing who performs what responsibility and coordinating the different groups during an outage will turn an otherwise disorganised rush for recovery into a rapid, organised recovery.
• Provide Your Staff With Training – Human error remains one of the primary contributors to unplanned outages; IT solutions for startups, regular training and strict change control processes generate a very positive return on investment.

Why This Matters Especially for Startups

A bad hour may be tolerable for larger businesses; however, many startup companies will not survive one failed hour of product launches, funding announcements and/or huge advertising campaigns. They lose too much momentum and can find it very difficult to regain that same momentum, much harder than they can ever regain their lost revenue. Therefore, having reliable IT solutions for startups (as opposed to thinking about these solutions after something has broken) can help ensure that you have a strong foundation built into your IT infrastructure which will allow you to build resiliency into your IT systems quickly – providing multiple options for scalability with regard to your hosting company, proper levels of monitoring, appropriate levels of security hardening, and creating a recovery plan – allowing your company to have the necessary tools to grow without outpacing your ability to keep your systems operating.

The Bottom Line

Most businesses experience downtime because of gaps in their processes — whether they’re gaps in monitoring, infrastructure, security or processes. Downtime often occurs due to these gaps either going unnoticed or being ignored until it is too late. Businesses that have the least trouble with downtime, typically, aren’t those that don’t have outages. Businesses that have the least amount of downtime tend to identify outages within seconds after they occurred, recover from them in minutes, and learn from their mistakes so that they don’t experience an outage in the same manner again. 

At MNB Soft Solutions, we assist businesses of all sizes in building that type of resilience – offering services such as infrastructure audits and 24/7 monitoring. Because the best time to fix downtime is before it happens.