UK businesses lost over 50 million hours and £3.7 billion due to Internet failures in 2023, according to a new report from Beaming, a specialist business ISP. Reliance on connectivity for trading and operational activities has increased among businesses in the last five years, and the cost of missed sales, lost productivity and other disruptions due to downtime has risen by 400%.
Beaming’s report – The Cost of Downtime: The Impact of Outages on UK Businesses in 2023 – shares its analysis of a Censuswide survey of businesses using connectivity from various Internet service providers and advice to help companies reduce downtime levels and costs. The report reveals that cumulatively, UK businesses experienced 8.8 million Internet failures and 50.5 million hours of disruptive downtime in 2023, where the ability to trade or access vital services was impaired.
The amount of time businesses lost to connectivity failures in 2023 was a fifth lower than in 2018 when previous Beaming research found that firms lost 60 million hours to downtime. However, the cost of that downtime has increased fivefold: from £742 million in 2018 to £3.7 billion in 2023.
Heightened dependence on connectivity for communication, e-commerce and access to cloud applications means 15% of UK businesses, some 850,000 nationwide, would now start losing money the moment their connectivity fails. This is 81,000 more firms than five years ago.
During eight-hour Internet outages – a standard working day – 39% of businesses now would lose money. This compares to 34% at the end of 2018 and represents an increase of 240,000 companies nationwide.