The cost of IT downtime is not a figure you look up. It is a figure you build, out of three numbers you already have, and the answer is almost never the one the internet gives you.
Search the question and you get a per-minute figure with a lot of zeros in it. That number is real. It just belongs to somebody else, usually a company with a data center and a night shift watching it. Pointed at a twenty-person office in Ogden it produces a number so large it stops being useful, so most owners read it, wince, and close the tab.
The useful number is smaller, duller and yours. Here is how to work it out.
Key Takeaways
- Your downtime cost is three numbers, not one. The payroll that keeps running, the revenue that never arrives, and the cost of catching up afterward.
- The catching up is usually the biggest of the three, and every online calculator leaves it out.
- The published figures come from data centers, not Utah offices. Uptime Institute found 57% of its 2025 respondents put their most recent major outage above $100,000. Those respondents run data centers for a living.
- Two Utah businesses the same size can pay ten times differently for the same hour. What decides it is whether your work waits or stops.
- No single failure causes most of your downtime. The largest category in Uptime’s 2026 resiliency survey was network problems, at 21%, which leaves four out of five outages coming from something else entirely.
- Your number is a purchasing decision. 1Wire’s managed IT solutions exist to make the hour less likely and shorter when it comes.
Why the downtime figures you find online are not yours
Published downtime costs are averages drawn from large enterprises, and an average is the one number that cannot describe your business.
Uptime Institute publishes the most careful outage research available. Its Annual Outage Analysis 2026, released on 13 May 2026, reports that 57% of respondents to Uptime’s 2025 annual survey said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000, and 20% put it above $1 million. Ninety-four organizations answered that particular question.
Now look at who answered. Those are data center operators, describing outages measured against racks of equipment, colocation contracts and customers with penalty clauses. The research is sound. The population is not yours.
The figures circulating in IT marketing are further away still. The most recent public survey from ITIC, published in September 2024, found that 97% of companies with more than a thousand employees put a single hour of downtime above $100,000. Read the qualifier. More than a thousand employees.
None of this is dishonest. It is simply not about a dental practice in Clearfield or a fabrication shop in Ogden. The right answer to a number that does not fit is not a bigger number. It is your own.
Your cost per hour is three numbers
An hour of downtime costs you the payroll you keep paying, plus the revenue you never recover, plus the work it takes to catch up once the systems come back.
That is the whole formula. No benchmark, no industry multiplier, no borrowed statistic. Everything in it is sitting in your payroll system, your point of sale or your accounting software right now. Most Utah owners we do this with are surprised twice: once by how straightforward it is, and once by which of the three parts turns out to be the largest.
What does an hour of downtime cost you?
Put in your own numbers. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored, so the figures stay on your screen.One hour of downtime costs you
$0 per hour
-
- Payroll that keeps running$0
-
- Revenue that does not arrive$0
-
- The recovery tail$0
Across the hours you lost last year, that is $0.
The recovery tail is costed at your normal payroll rate with no overtime premium, so this is the careful version of the number. It also makes no attempt to price customers who do not come back, which is real and is not arithmetic.
No obligation. Just expert advice.
Part one: the payroll that keeps running
Payroll is the only cost of downtime that is completely certain, because it is the one you have already committed to.
Your people are paid whether or not the network is up, which makes this the floor under every outage and the easiest of the three numbers to get right. Take the fully loaded hourly cost of the employees who genuinely stop working: wages plus payroll taxes plus benefits, not the figure on the offer letter.
For an outside check, the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes one. Through the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which covers workers under unemployment insurance, BLS reported on 11 June 2026 that Utah’s average weekly wage in the fourth quarter of 2025 was $1,389. That is roughly $35 an hour across a forty hour week before taxes and benefits. Salt Lake County ran higher at $1,607 a week, Utah County at $1,282, Weber County at $1,213 and Washington County at $1,016.
Then apply the part most calculators get wrong. Count only the people who actually stop. In a Logan warehouse where scanning is down, that may be everyone on the floor. In an Orem accounting office, half the staff will keep working on paper for an hour without much trouble. Multiply your loaded hourly cost by the number genuinely idle, and you have your first figure.
Part two: the revenue that does not arrive
That distinction is the difference between a scary number and a true one. Revenue that is delayed comes back. A law firm in Draper that loses two hours on a Tuesday still bills those hours on Wednesday, because the work exists and the client still wants it. Revenue that is destroyed does not. A lunch counter in Midvale that cannot take cards from eleven to one does not serve those covers later. Those customers ate somewhere else.
So take your gross revenue for a normal operating hour, then ask what share of it survives a delay. For appointment-based businesses in Salt Lake City and Provo, most of it usually survives, because the appointment moves. For anything transactional, walk-in or time-bound, much of it does not. Be honest rather than conservative. A figure you guessed low is a figure nobody acts on.
If you take payments over the network, and almost every Utah business now does, this is the line that dominates.
Part three: the recovery tail
No downtime calculator online includes this, and in our experience with Utah businesses it is routinely the largest of the three. When the network returns, nothing is where it was. Somebody re-keys the transactions written on paper. Somebody calls back every customer who could not get through. The queue that stacked up during the outage is still there, and it gets cleared in overtime or by pushing tomorrow’s work into next week.
A distribution business in West Valley City losing ninety minutes of order entry does not spend ninety minutes recovering. It spends the rest of the afternoon, and the mistakes made in the rush surface a week later as credits and returns.
So estimate how long it takes to be genuinely back to normal, not merely back online, and count all of it. For most offices along the Wasatch Front that tail runs longer than the outage. For anything with inventory, scheduling or dispatch, considerably longer.
Add the three parts together and you have a cost per hour that is defensible, specific and small enough to use. That number is the reason managed IT services get bought, and it is a better argument than any statistic we could hand you.
Two Utah businesses, same hour, different bill
Some work stops dead. A clinic in Layton cannot see patients without the practice management system, and a machine shop cannot run a job it cannot pull up. Some degrades but continues: a design studio in Provo keeps drawing and loses the file server for an hour. Some simply queues and is recovered later.
Where you sit on that scale decides your number more than headcount or turnover ever will, and it also decides what is worth fixing first.
| Work stops | Work degrades | Work waits | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it looks like in Utah | A clinic in Layton without its practice management system. A shop floor that cannot pull up the job. | A design studio in Provo that keeps drawing but loses the file server and the proofing loop. | A project team in Draper whose deliverable is due Friday and whose Tuesday afternoon simply moves. |
| Payroll cost | Full. Everyone affected is idle and paid. | Partial. People work slower and around the problem. | Low. The hours get used on something else. |
| Revenue cost | High and mostly destroyed. The appointment or the sale does not come back. | Moderate. Some slips, some is recovered. | Near zero, as long as the deadline still holds. |
| Recovery tail | Long. Paper records, callbacks and a full day of catching up. | Medium. Version conflicts and rework are the usual bill. | Short, until the outage eats enough hours to threaten the deadline. |
| What one hour really costs | Several times what the payroll line alone suggests. | Roughly what the payroll line suggests. | Less than you fear, right up until it is not. |
| What to fix first | Redundancy on the connection, then on whatever the work runs through. | Where the shared files and licences live, and how quickly they come back. | Nothing urgent. Revisit when a deadline, a second site or compliance changes the picture. |
Where the hours actually come from
Uptime Institute's Data Center Resiliency Survey 2026, run in February and March 2026 across more than 450 operators and 500 vendors, found network problems to be the most frequently reported cause of IT service outages, at 21%. Read that the other way around. The biggest single category on the list accounted for about one outage in five, which means four in five came from somewhere else.
That is what a year of downtime looks like in a Utah office. A workstation that will not boot on the Monday of a deadline week. An update that goes in over the weekend and takes the line-of-business application with it. A failing drive in a server in Orem that nobody was watching. A phishing email that turns into two days of cleanup. None of it is dramatic. Together it is most of your hours.
The internet is the one item on that list with a clean answer. Add a second connection and outages on that side become close to non-existent, because traffic moves across before anyone in the building notices. Our standard business internet carries a 99.9% uptime commitment, and with backup internet connections in place that rises to 99.999%, a handful of minutes across a whole year. Bonded internet connections do the same for businesses that need the bandwidth too, and we covered how failover behaves in what happens to your WiFi when the internet goes down.
Everything else has no single switch to flip. Those hours come down through patching on a schedule, watching hardware before it fails, testing the restore rather than trusting the backup, and knowing what is due for replacement. That is the job of 1Wire's managed IT solutions, and it is where the hours are.
Downtime and Utah businesses
We have been keeping Utah businesses online since 2006, which means we have been on the phone during a lot of other people's worst mornings.
Our technicians work in Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Orem, Layton, Murray, Midvale, Draper, Logan, Clearfield and down to St. George, and the people who answer when you call are here rather than three time zones away. That matters most on the day the number you calculated above stops being theoretical.
Bring us your three figures and the hours you lost last year. We will tell you honestly which part of your setup is generating them, whether it is the circuit, the equipment or something nobody has patched since the last remodel, and what it would take to make next year quieter.
Book a time with us. No obligation. Just expert advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does an hour of IT downtime cost a small business?
There is no reliable published figure for a small business, because almost every number in circulation comes from surveys of large enterprises or data center operators. Your own figure is the payroll of the people who stop working, plus the revenue you cannot recover later, plus the cost of catching up after the systems return. Most small businesses can calculate it in under an hour from records they already keep.
How do you calculate the cost of IT downtime?
Add three things. First, the fully loaded hourly cost of the employees who genuinely stop working, including payroll taxes and benefits. Second, your gross revenue for a normal operating hour multiplied by the share of it that is lost rather than delayed. Third, the cost of the recovery period after the outage ends, which covers re-keying, callbacks, overtime and the backlog. Multiply the total by the hours you actually lost last year.
Why are the downtime cost figures online so high?
Because of who was surveyed. Uptime Institute's Annual Outage Analysis 2026 found 57% of respondents put their most recent major outage above $100,000, and those respondents operate data centers. ITIC's September 2024 survey reported that 97% of companies with over a thousand employees exceeded $100,000 an hour. Both are accurate for their populations, and neither describes a twenty-person Utah office.
What is the most common cause of IT downtime?
There is no dominant cause, which is the useful finding. Uptime Institute's Data Center Resiliency Survey 2026, covering more than 450 operators and 500 vendors, found network problems to be the largest single category of IT service outages at 21%, which leaves about four in five outages caused by something else: failed hardware, an update that breaks an application, a security incident, an expired certificate or a cloud service having a bad morning. The internet is the exception, because a backup connection removes most of that risk on its own.
Does an hour of downtime only cost you an hour?
No, and this is the part most calculations miss. The outage ends when the systems come back, but the cost continues through the recovery period, when paper records get re-keyed, missed customers get called back and the accumulated backlog gets cleared in overtime. For most businesses the recovery period is longer than the outage itself, and it grows with the length of the outage rather than staying fixed.
Does 1Wire help Utah businesses reduce IT downtime?
Yes. 1Wire has been a Utah internet provider since 2006 and provides managed IT to businesses across the state, including Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Orem, Layton, Murray, Midvale, Draper, Logan and St. George. Because the connection and the support sit on the same agreement, there is one company responsible when something drops. The managed IT solutions page lists what is included.
