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Global Tech Outages: The High Price of Small Errors

Recent Statistics & Reports

Security breaches are identified as one of the five most frequent root causes of major tech outages, collectively accounting for nearly 90% of all major outages alongside software bugs, configuration issues, database errors, and infrastructure failures.

Tech outage Security breach

Sectors like energy and utilities face more security breaches compared to other types of failures

Tech outage Energy Utilities

Security incidents have resulted in an estimated cumulative $29.4 billion in losses from the 38 incidents considered in the dataset.

Despite the percentage decrease, the number of major tech outages caused by security issues actually rose from 3 in the 1980s to 20 in the 2020s.

In the first half of the 2020s (so far), security issues are behind 24% of the 82 failures catalogued.

When combined with configuration and deployment errors, security breaches account for 34% of outages.

Tech outage Configuration error Deployment error

In the 1980s, security breaches and cyberattacks were responsible for 50% of the 6 outages recorded during that decade.

Top Categories

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Security breach

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Configuration error

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Deployment error