Over 100 million people worldwide tuned in to watch Super Bowl XLVII. Therefore, it could be argued that was the most viewed and infamous power outage to wreak havoc on the grandest of scales.

It just goes to show, downtime happens.

We can’t really say for sure how or what occurred, although early speculation placed blame on Beyoncé’s lights-out performance, a manager at the Superdome, site of the game, said it was not the halftime show, but that a local energy company is claiming it had trouble with one of the two main lines that deliver power to the stadium from a local substation.

It could have been a software glitch, or a hardware problem that sacked power to the stadium for 33 minutes and left the NFL with a black eye.  But the downtime incident powered a social media surge, as hundreds of thousands of people began Tweeting about the #poweroutage.

Which brings us to Twitter itself? Having suffered its own downtime nightmare back on January 31, Twitter was able to handle the blitz of people tweeting about the Super Bowl’s misfortune. Twitter announced it processed just over 24 million tweets during the game, with the mini missives coming in at a rate of 231,500 a minute during the power outage.

Downtime appears in many different forms and at many different times, across all industries and business landscapes. The Twitter downtime occurrence was much different from that the NFL witnessed, but both incidents took their tolls financially and in terms of a hit to brand reputation.

Within the enterprise there is an acceptable level of downtime that occurs each year. On average, businesses suffer between three and five hours of downtime per year, far too much in our humble opinion, at an average cost of $138,888 per hour. While that’s a staggering figure, the damage to the brand can be even more catastrophic.

Let’s get back to the Super Bowl and the power outage. The City of New Orleans, which hosted the game, is already worried it’ll lose out on hosting future games because of what happened. That’s a city known for its ability to show its visitors a good time, but those businesses that depend on major events like the Super Bowl to draw in tourism dollars could suffer from that 33-minute absence of electricity.

Again, downtime comes in many forms depending on the industry and the ramifications have the potential to throw their victims for a significant loss. It’s like that old saying that you need to expect the unexpected. When the unexpected does arrive you have to be prepared to come back from that downtime swiftly and with as little disruption to your business as possible. With the right technology and the right best practices in place, you can minimize the damage and decrease the chance of downtime seriously hampering your ability to do business.

As a college student interning here at Stratus, I’ve been exposed to the world of downtime — something not a whole lot of college students can speak to.  As a typical college student with the four year undergrad tuition fees (a little more than $33,000 per year in my case), I’ll admit we don’t tend to think of the possibilities of downtime with our everyday necessities — Facebook, Twitter, or connection to our school’s network for example. We don’t think about the possibilities of not having instantaneous access to all of these things, until something does go down.

Well, I got to experience my very first real downtime event last week when my school’s server went down for nearly six hours. Just like any business network, our network is our lifeline at school. From doing research for our mid-term papers, to signing into Twitter, we’re constantly connected to the server. The reality is these incidents of downtime affect us as students in more ways than we’d like to think – or in some students’ case, more than they know about.

Let’s break down what happens when a server experiences unexpected downtime on a college campus by taking you through that dark day of downtime I experienced last week. It was a typical Tuesday just like any other. I was in my public relations class, reviewing that day’s lecture, when the professor attempted to click an external link within her PowerPoint presentation. She got an error message from her browser, and with a puzzled look on her face our professor closed the PowerPoint and attempted to reopen it to see if that would solve her problem:

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server.

We silently cheered to each other as the professor decided that due to the unexpected downtime she would call class early that day. We couldn’t have asked for it to play out any better…that was until our professor decided to tack on another additional writing response due next class to make up for the missed class time. Unable to decide if this downtime had been a good or bad thing I tried to stay productive and write a paper for another class in the library…

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server.

Again?!?! I was shut out of the research databases thanks to our servers’ downtime, and in frustration I left the library all together. Well this is perfect, I figured both incidents of downtime were a sign to use my afternoon to be unproductive for a-while and catch up on some Call of Duty…

ERROR! Cannot connect to the server

You have to be kidding me – a whole afternoon of any sort of productivity (recreational or educational) gone thanks to downtime.

I am just one student. In all, 2200 students and another few hundred faculty and staff were affected by the server downtime. Our productivity for that afternoon was completely shot.The school’s image was damaged from both inside and outside the campus. From angry phone calls made by parents whose students complained about the lack of connection, to the angry words from students across the campus – our IT department and the college struggled with the downtime. With tuition, room and board, and the other miscellaneous fees totaling over $43,000 per year it’s about time universities took the time and invested in preventing server downtime instead of wasting time and money trying to recover from it.

If a burglar broke into your home, you might be motivated to install a security system. The same goes for downtime. Every year, downtime robs companies of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and in this day and age, with more and more businesses moving to the cloud, the issue of downtime is becoming a bigger problem. This past Monday, the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency reported that since 2007, a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 large cloud service providers have caused an economic impact of more than $71.7 million.

Throughout the course of any given week, a wide variety of businesses are impacted by planned and unplanned downtime. While industry type may vary, the consequences do not.  It’s shocking to see how many businesses are robbed by downtime. Yet, they don’t seem to grasp the detrimental effects of an outage. Stratus has conducted surveys with ITIC that have found most businesses don’t adequately calculate the cost and affects that an outage will have on their business, whether it be qualitative or quantitative.

The following results from our latest survey illustrates why some businesses don’t know how much downtime actually steals from them:

• 29 percent of businesses don’t consider customer dissatisfaction as a contributing factor to their cost of IT downtime.
• 38 percent of businesses don’t factor in damage to their company’s reputation.
• 81 percent of businesses omit goods and materials lost from their cost of IT downtime calculations.

• 45  percent of businesses don’t consider lost sales in downtime cost.

It’s time to put a face to downtime so companies recognize why they need to take action. And speaking of action, I’ll leave you with this statistic: last year Stratus had an average of just 81 seconds of downtime across our installed base of 8,000 servers.

To learn more about how much downtime cost your business read our latest analyst report.

The average manufacturing IT system will experience 3.6 instances of downtime at a cost of $65,830 annually, according to a recent readership survey conducted by IndustryWeek magazine for Stratus Technologies.

“The statistical results are a good indication as to why the response to this email survey was so strong; the persistence and punishing cost of IT systems downtime are very much on the minds of plant operations management,” said Dave LeClair, director of product management & marketing, Stratus Technologies. “As high as these costs appear, our experience in manufacturing suggests these calculations understate the true financial impact and include only the more obvious cost factors, such a labor and reduced volume. In reality, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

More than five hundred IndustryWeek readers responded to the March 2012 survey. The magazine tabulated results by annual revenue categories – less than $100 million, $100-$999 million and above $1 billion – and by the average of all respondents. Results were as follows:

Source: “Manufacturer IT Applications Study,” March 2012, IndustryWeek magazine

Only three out of seven respondents said they have a strategy in place for high availability computing! The percentage of manufacturers with annual revenue of more than $1 billion that said they have a strategy (41 percent) was nearly twice that of those with revenue of less than $100 million (23 percent). Larger companies also used IT technologies better suited to ensuring high availability than did smaller firms. Despite these preparations, large manufacturers are still losing nearly $150,000 annually from IT system downtime.

The full survey results will be presented during a webinar hosted by IndustryWeek on May 31, 2012.  NetSuite’s GM of Manufacturing/Wholesale & Distribution, Roman Bukary, and Stratus’ Director of Global Alliances, Peter Cook, will discuss the results of the survey, provide insights into what manufacturers are currently experiencing with regard to downtime, and offer some best practices to prevent it. To pre-register for the webinar, visit http://bit.ly/IHZxLA.

Calculating the cost of downtime is perhaps the biggest hurdle for IT departments addressing availability concerns. In February 2012, Aberdeen Group conducted an in-depth analysis of a number of factors surrounding datacenter downtime. Survey respondents were asked questions concerning the average number of downtime events per year, the average length of an event, the cost per hour of downtime and the time it took to recover 90% of business operations following a business interruption.

Instead of worrying about how downtime is hurting your business without being able to pinpoint the dollar amount per hour,  reputation loss or productivity loss, read the report and find out exactly how outages affect best-in-class companies like yours – and how they are taking steps to address the issue.