What Does One Hour of
IT Downtime Really Cost?

One hour of IT downtime costs a company with 10 to 50 employees roughly €1,200 to €9,000. Specifically: do the math honestly and a single hour of downtime at a 25-person company costs over €3,000 — a full day easily exceeds €20,000. And it hits almost everyone: according to Bitkom’s 2026 business protection study, 67% of German companies with 10 or more employees were definitely affected by theft, espionage or sabotage in the past twelve months, and another 29% suspect it. Outages, theft or damage of IT and production systems or operations alone caused €36.5 billion in damage.

The problem: these costs never appear as a single line item in any accounting system. They are distributed across productivity losses, rework, external service providers, lost orders, and disrupted customer relationships. At the end of the year, the CEO asks: “Why did we make so little profit?” — and the answer rarely appears under a line item called “IT outages.”

The numbers in context

What an hour costs depends mainly on three things: how many people cannot work, what a working hour costs your business and how much revenue depends directly on IT. For a 10-person office that can do some work offline, it is roughly €1,200 per hour. For a 50-person retail or manufacturing business that stops without IT, it is closer to €9,000 per hour.

For comparison: a 2013 study by Techconsult for HP arrived at roughly €25,000 per hour — but for firms with 200 to 4,999 employees. The figure is still often quoted for small businesses, where it does not fit.

That sounds high — until you do the math honestly. That is exactly what the interactive calculator below does.

Why SMBs massively underestimate the costs

Most CEOs have no intuition for what an outage really costs. The reason: the costs are distributed. Nobody sends you an invoice for “€18,000 IT outage on March 15.” Instead, the damage spreads across dozens of small items:

• Employees waiting three hours for a new server — salaries keep running
• An external IT provider called in on an emergency basis — hourly rate €180 and up
• An important meeting that needs to be rescheduled — opportunity costs unclear
• Rework the team has to do evenings or weekends — overtime or lost work-life balance
• Customers who hung up in frustration — maybe they come back, maybe not

In the end, it looks like “nothing happened.” But the damage is there. It just does not appear in the balance sheet under a single line item.

What studies say — and who they apply to

Bitkom Wirtschaftsschutz 2026 (1,003 German companies with 10+ employees, surveyed in spring 2026):

• 67% were definitely affected by theft, espionage or sabotage in the past 12 months, another 29% suspect it
• €211 to 270.8 billion total damage to the German economy, 76% of it from cyberattacks
• €36.5 billion from outages, theft or damage of IT and production systems or operations (previous study: €73.3 billion)

HP/Techconsult 2013 (300 German mid-sized firms with 200 to 4,999 employees): 4 outages per year on average, 3.8 hours to recover, roughly €25,000 per hour and about €380,000 per year. The data is old and covers much larger firms — still a useful order of magnitude for the mid-market.

ITIC 2024 (over 1,000 firms worldwide): for more than 90% of mid-sized and large companies, one hour of downtime costs over $300,000. Micro businesses are typically far below that according to ITIC — but the impact can still threaten their existence because they lack reserves.

Sources: Bitkom, Wirtschaftsschutz 2026 (German) · CIO.de on the HP/Techconsult study (2013, German) · ITIC 2024 Hourly Cost of Downtime

Conclusion: Prevention is cheaper than an incident

Managed IT starts at €89 per user per month (excl. VAT); what is included is listed on our managed services page. For 25 employees, that is from about €2,225 per month (excl. VAT).

A single full day of downtime at medium IT dependency costs the same company over €21,000 according to the calculator — almost ten months of managed IT at the entry price. Prevent two such days a year, or cut them to an hour, and you recover a large part of the cost. Hidden costs such as lost customers are not even included.

As a Managed Service Provider, we take care of monitoring, patching, backup management and incident response. You pay a predictable flat rate — and get a team that spots problems before they become outages.

Frequently asked questions about the cost of IT downtime