When Network Downtime Costs Your Business $150 Million

One of the biggest news stories in August was when Delta experienced an internal outage followed by the failure of a backup system at one of its operations centers in Atlanta. The outage, which only lasted for five hours but had rippling effects, caused over 2,000 canceled flights over three days, stranded thousands of travelers, and led Delta to provide vouchers and refunds to many of the affected travelers. Delta revealed the cost of that five-hour outage this week. The grand total? $150 million.That number is staggering. But Delta isn’t the only one feeling the pain of an outage. Southwest’s outage in July also hurt the company’s bottom line, some estimating that it cost the organization $177 million. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a single data center outage today is about $730,000.