Executive Summary

• The Uptime Institute reported in their 2025 annual report that the number of outages is decreasing; however, cyber attacks are on the rise, and they’re causing severe financial and reputational repercussions. This means we need to take a different approach to be able for future proofing data centres.
• Power outages remain the most common cause of outages; however, downtime caused by human error and network and IT system failures is on the rise.
• A multi-faceted approach to data centre resilience must be adopted and continuously evolving when it comes to future-proofing the next wave of data centres, especially to keep up with the rapidly evolving demands.

As data centre infrastructure evolves and systems become innovative and beautifully complex, downtime also changes. When systems change, so does the nature of downtime: its causes and its consequences. This article explores the report from Uptime Intelligence around outages and downtime and what that could look like when future-proofing the next generation of data centres.

Fewer outages are happening

According to the 2025 annual outage report by Uptime Intelligence, the industry has experienced fewer outages overall, and the severity of reported incidents has continued to decline. This is where the shift comes in; the nature of downtime has changed, and now we see cyber incidents on the rise, causing severe consequences. The report also states that 1 in 5 respondents had an outage that cost over $1 million, and 54% of respondents reported losses above $100,000.

Thus, the conclusion is that while outages are becoming less frequent, they are growing more costly, both financially and reputationally. Take a look at the AWS outage in October 2025, for example, which caused betwene $38 million and $581 milion in insured losses around the world. The incident was reported not just by industry operatives but also by the general public; it was plastered all over social media and news, which had great reputational stakes.

Power issues are the most common causes

For most serious and severe data centre outages, power remains the most common reason, which comes as no surprise, particularly because the high-density AI workloads are demanding more power than ever, thus putting a strain on the power grid. We’re almost in an era where grid instability could be the new normal until operators find new, sustainable, innovative solutions to deal with the instability.

According to the report, however, outages caused by network and IT issues are on the rise too, regardless of the complex systems and processes in place. The number of staff failing to follow procedures has risen too, resulting in costly outages, whether that was due to human error, a fault in the procedures, the staffing shortage, etc. There’s an opportunity to prevent this and reduce future incidents through reviewing processes and training.

What this means for future-proofing data centres for business continuity and disaster avoidance

With businesses unable to afford the cost of downtime and needing to be running 24/7, there is a real sense of urgency when it comes to creating solutions to ensure the business can keep running; offsite backup isn’t enough, especially when recovery time expectations are measured in minutes rather than hours. As a result, private cloud strategies built around distributed data centres and real-time data replication can mitigate disasters and avoid the costs and significant impacts downtime could bring to an organisation.

Furthermore, organisations are future proofing by designing for modularity, increasing their bservaions on power, cooling and IT systems and greater automation in failover and recovery, alongside testing and change management. A multi-faceted approach to future-proofing data centres reflects the shift towards resilience models that can adapt as the workloads, risks, and infrastructure evolve in this rapidly changing industry.

The data centre industry is taking great strides in reducing the number of outages and keeping things running around the clock; there has been great innovative solutions for building and adapting resilience as the industry continues to evolve, but this progress comes with a paradox; as downtime reduces, its impact becomes more severe, really eposing how closel digital services are weaved into business operations and customer expectations.

It’s no longer about eliminating downtime, as 100% uptime is a near-impossible feat; it’s about reducing the consequences and getting back online as soon as possible. The next phase of resilience in the next generation of data centres will be defined by how risk is understood, managem communicated and dealt with when the risks evolve. Therefore, maintaining resilience is a continuous, shifting capability that should evolve with the data centre rather than be static.