British businesses suffered three days of internet downtime each on average during 2016, costing the UK economy £7 billion in lost productivity and extra overtime, according to research conducted by Beaming, a business ISP.
Beaming worked with research company Opinium, a mathematician from Imperial College and more than 500 businesses using a range of internet providers and connectivity services to quantify the impact of internet outages on UK businesses and the wider economy. More than three-quarters of businesses experienced at least one connectivity failure that prevented them from trading or accessing vital online services last year. On average, UK organisations suffered four outages each during 2016, and a wait of six hours every time for service to be restored.
It found that 77 per cent of businesses – approximately 4.2 million organisations nationwide – experienced connectivity failures in 2016. Affected organisations suffered 27 hours of lost connectivity and losses of £1,287 each on average.
Although a quarter (25 per cent) of businesses mitigate some downtime by moving to tasks that do not require connectivity and 13 per cent switch to alternative connections, day-to-day operations grind to a halt at more than a third of businesses (38 per cent) when the internet fails. More than one in ten (13 per cent) businesses start losing money immediately when hit by outages and almost half (46 per cent) suffer a negative financial impact after four hours without connectivity.
Cost of internet downtime at affected businesses
| Total | Solo
1 person |
Micro
2-9 people |
Small
10-49 people |
Medium
50-249 people |
Large
250+ people |
|
| Businesses affected by downtime | 77% | 62% | 73% | 75% | 83% | 88% |
| Number of outages per affected business | 4.7 | 4.5 | 5.1 | 4.5 | 4.3 | 5.1 |
| Downtime per affected business (hours) | 27.3 | 21.8 | 28.4 | 25.7 | 17.0 | 39.4 |
| Average service recovery time | 5.8 | 4.9 | 5.6 | 5.7 | 4.0 | 7.7 |
| Productive hours lost per affected business | 19.5 | 13.5 | 19.5 | 17.4 | 8.3 | 30.1 |
| Cost per productive hour lost | £66 | £3 | £27 | £227 | £1,888 | £16,526 |
| Average loss during year at affected business | £1,287 | £41 | £527 | £3,950 | £15,670 | £497,433 |
| Estimated losses all UK businesses (millions) | £6,990 | £167 | £505 | £863 | £616 | £4,813 |
Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming, comments: “Internet failures can happen for all sorts of reasons, including malicious attacks, poorly configured routers or simply not using products that are appropriate for business. As businesses grow, it becomes more important to put in place the right capacity, to have the ability to scale quickly and to protect networks from cyber attacks. Any organisation with more than 10 internet users should be monitoring their systems for emerging problems and have experts on hand that can help immediately at the first sign of a problem.”
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