Uptime Intelligence has published its ‘Annual Data Center Outages Analysis’. This finds that outage prevention remains a central focus for data centre operators as demand growth, AI-driven workloads, and power constraints reshape risk profiles. Operators are grappling with increasing system complexity, grid instability, growing co-dependencies, and evolving external threats.
Key findings from the report include:
- For the fifth consecutive year, Uptime Intelligence research suggests that outage frequency (on a per-site basis) is declining. However, the pace of improvement has slowed compared with previous years.
- External infrastructure failures are becoming more prominent in publicly reported outages.
- Outage costs continue to rise slowly. For the second year in a row, one in five say their most recent impactful outage cost more than $1 million.
- Power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, but risks are evolving. Failures involving UPS systems, transfer switches, and generators are dominant; however, worsening grid constraints and high-density workloads are introducing new pressure points.
- Operators are adapting investment strategies towards automation and control systems to manage complexity, while resilience assessments remain more focused on internal systems than on external and systemic risks.
- The frequency of major fires at data centres has increased gradually in recent years, with lithium-ion batteries in UPS systems a clear contributing factor.
