Businesses in the UK and Ireland face a median annual cost of about £30m from high-impact IT outages, according to new research carried out by software provider New Relic. The survey of 1,700 IT and engineering professionals in 23 countries found major outages carry a median cost of around £1.56m per hour, or roughly £33,000 per minute of downtime.

A third of UK and Irish respondents cited tool sprawl as a barrier to achieving full-stack monitoring. Outages are less frequent and costly than the EMEA average, reflecting more mature practices, but 26% still experience high-impact outages at least once a week. Around 22% said these incidents cost between £780,000 and £2.3m per hour. Over a third either do not know or are not tracking outage costs. Engineers spend about 25% of their time dealing with incidents, reducing scope for innovation, according to the research. AI monitoring use rose from 35% in 2024 to 45% in 2025, with only 5% not deploying or planning to deploy.

"Our latest findings are a wake-up call for UK and Irish organisations, which are severely underestimating the business cost of IT outages. Organisations that aren’t investing in observability not only risk huge revenue losses, the reputational damage from frequent outages is equally, if not more concerning,” said New Relic EMEA CTO, Manesh Tailor.

The research also found that security, governance and compliance drove investment for 48% of respondents, followed by AI adoption at 34% and cost management at 33%.

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