Uptime Institute’s 7th annual outage report highlights that networking issues are becoming significant threats to data center reliability. While power outages remain the leading cause of downtime—accounting for 54% of all major interruptions—special attention is being drawn to network-related problems that affect IT services.
Recent data shows that the frequency of outages is decreasing. In 2024, 53% of data center operators reported having experienced an outage in the past three years, down from 78% in 2020. This trend indicates that while outages are becoming less frequent, their impact remains significant, especially in relation to network connectivity.
Power failures continue to dominate as the primary reason for outages, with common causes including:
- UPS failure (42%)
- Transfer switch failure (36%)
- Generator failure (28%)
Chris Brown, CTO at Uptime Institute, stresses that power remains an unforgiving element in data center operations due to its binary nature—equipment either works or it doesn’t.
Interestingly, the severity of outages seems to be lessening. According to Uptime, only 9% of reported incidents in 2024 were categorized as serious or severe. Many operators indicated that about three-quarters of outages were not significant, revealing improvements in overall resilience.
However, an alarming increase in IT and network-related outages has been noted, primarily due to escalated complexity in network configurations. Factors such as evolving cloud services contribute to cascading failures, where one issue can lead to overloaded data center capacities.
The report identifies some common causes for major network-related outages:
- Configuration/change management failure (50%)
- Third-party network provider failure (34%)
- Hardware failure (31%)
Moreover, issues linked to human error persist as a considerable challenge in data center management. Failures in following established procedures by staff have risen significantly over the past year. Uptime’s findings suggest that human error can be effectively mitigated through better training and adherence to procedures, presenting a potential area of improvement for operations.
Overall, while the landscape for outages and their management is evolving—showing some signs of improvement—the challenges posed by networking complexities and human factors require continued attention from data center operators to ensure reliability and uptime.
