Uptime Institute released its eighth annual outage analysis on May 13, 2026. It found per-site outage rates have fallen for five straight years, though improvement is slowing. Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, with UPS systems, transfer switches and generators the most common failure points. Outages that start outside the data center are becoming more common, and fiber and connectivity failures are rising and more likely to cause extended disruptions. Over nine years of publicly reported incidents, third-party providers, including cloud, internet, telecom and colocation companies, account for about two-thirds.
The cost data is the part business owners should notice. In Uptime's 2025 survey, 57% of respondents said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and one in five reported costs above $1 million. Failure to follow established procedures was the leading driver of human-error outages.
For an on-premises server room, test the UPS and generator under load on a schedule, replace UPS batteries on the manufacturer's timeline, and make sure someone owns the maintenance contract. For colocation and cloud, ask your provider for its outage history, maintenance procedures and how it notifies customers. And since connectivity failures are rising, confirm that your primary and backup internet circuits truly take different physical paths and carriers rather than sharing a conduit.
Uptime's Andy Lawrence noted that future failures will increasingly not come from a single point of failure, which is a good reason to review dependencies, not only equipment.
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