Data center outages continue to occur, though the frequency of outages is declining, a new industrywide study indicates.
The Uptime Institute has released its 7th Annual Outage Analysis Report, revealing that while overall outage frequency continues to decline, power-related issues remain the primary concern for data center operators, and costs continue to rise when failures do occur.
The 2025 data center outage analysis echoes many of the same core themes of the organization’s 2024 report, which also noted a decline in outages as the overall multi-year trend improves.
The study draws on multiple data sources, including Uptime Institute’s global surveys, information from organization members and partners, and a database of publicly reported incidents through news and social media.
Key findings from the 2025 report include:
-
53% of operators reported an outage in the past three years, down from 78% in 2020.
-
Only 9% of reported incidents in 2024 were classified as serious or severe, the lowest level recorded by Uptime to date.
-
Power remains the dominant cause of impactful outages at 54% of cases.
-
Staff failing to follow procedures increased by 10 percentage points compared to 2024.
-
54% of respondents say their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000, with 20% reporting costs exceeding $1 million.
-
80% of operators believe better management and processes would have prevented their most recent downtime incident.
“Most data center operators have very, very few outages,” Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at the Uptime Institute, said during a webinar detailing the report findings. “But of course, when they do occur, there are quite big consequences.”
Declining Outage Frequency Amid Growing Complexity
The report reveals consistent improvement in data center outage prevention across the industry, continuing a four-year trend of declining incidents despite growing infrastructure complexity.
“Outages are becoming less frequent and less severe relative to the rapid growth of digital infrastructure,” Lawrence said. “This trend has held for several years, underscoring industry progress in risk management and reliability.”
Despite this progress, new risks are emerging that could challenge the industry’s reliability improvements. One such risk cited by the Uptime Institute is climate change. In recent years, there have been a growing number of outages linked to climate change impacts, such as very high temperatures or electricity being cut off because of fires or smoke.
Power Issues Dominate Outage Causes
Power-related failures continue to be the primary concern for data center operators, with uninterruptible power supply (UPS) failures particularly problematic.
“Every piece of equipment in the data center, whether it’s a facilities piece of equipment or an IT piece of equipment, has power,” Chris Brown, CTO of the Uptime Institute, explained. “It needs power to operate, and power is pretty unforgiving.”
Brown noted that UPS hardware is the last line of defense against power anomalies coming from the power grid and system-level issues. Looking forward, Brown expects that power issues will continue to be a growing challenge for data center operators, especially as AI increases power demands.
“As these densities go up, as the overall electrical demand of the data center goes up, it’s going to put more stress on the systems,” Brown said. “That’s going to increase the opportunity for incidents in data centers.”
Human Error: The Preventable Problem
While dealing with power outages isn’t easy, there is another common cause of data center outages and downtime that should be easier to improve.
The report consistently found that human error accounts for two-thirds to three-quarters of all outages. A notable trend was the increased failure of data center staff to follow established procedures. Brown attributed this to the rapid growth of the industry and insufficient training.
“We’re seeing people having trouble just getting enough time to create processes and procedures for data centers and give people with very limited experience rudimentary training before those data centers go live,” Brown explained.
The Uptime Institute hopes that data center operators can make progress in the years to come by dealing with the issues that lead to human error through better training, processes, procedures and communication.
“This is under our control, this is probably the low-hanging fruit, this is probably the cheapest way to reduce the likelihood of outages,” Lawrence said.
