The Biggest Threats to Data Center Uptime – and How to Overcome Them

If you want to increase data center uptime, you need to identify and mitigate the most common sources of outages. This can be challenging because there are many reasons why a data center may go down, and it’s typically not feasible to address every single one. Instead, data center operators must decide which uptime threats to prioritize.

To that end, a new report from the Uptime Institute offers valuable guidance. The report details the most common data center uptime challenges as of 2024 and offers some surprising findings about which events trigger data center outages.

The Biggest Threats to Data Center Uptime

You might think that the most common cause of data center downtime would be risks like cyber-attacks or extreme weather, which tend to receive a lot of attention in the media whenever they occur.

In reality, though, these are negligible risks from a data center uptime perspective. The issues that are at the heart of most data center failures fall into the following categories:

1. Physical System Failures

The single most frequent reason why data centers fail is power issues. They account for a whopping 52% of all data center outages, according to the Uptime Institute report.

A further 19% of outages stem from data center cooling problems, which the Institute categorizes separately from power system issues.

This means that the biggest uptime risk to data centers, by far, is the failure of physical systems. Data center operators who want to improve uptime should invest in solutions like redundant energy supplies or HVAC systems.

2. Third-Party Provider Challenges

The next most common threat to data center uptime is what the Uptime Institute categorizes as issues with third-party providers. This means failures caused by service providers with whom companies contract to manage data centers through an outsourcing agreement or similar arrangement.

It's hard to say whether taking data center operations in-house would mitigate this issue. It would seem to reason that data center outsourcing companies, which specialize in day-to-day data center operations, are likely to achieve better uptime rates than businesses for which data center management is not a key focus. But your mileage on this front may vary depending on how adept your in-house staff are (or aren’t) at managing data centers.

At any rate, this data point is a reminder that if you opt for a third-party provider to manage data center operations, you should ask about its uptime record to ensure the provider doesn’t become the weakest link in your data center availability strategy.

3. IT Equipment Failure

IT system hardware and software failure is the third most common source of data center downtime – which is not surprising, since companies have struggled with crashing servers since the dawn of the digital age.

There’s no magic bullet to mitigate this risk, but there are tried-and-true strategies – such as investing in better monitoring and observability solutions and creating backup IT environments complete with automated failover controls so that if a server crashes, its workloads can move to another server instantaneously.

4. Network Failures

Network failures are similar to IT equipment failures: They contribute to data center downtime at almost exactly the same rate, and they are a type of challenge that businesses have long contended with.

As with increasing IT equipment uptime, strategies for improving network reliability in data centers include better network monitoring and building redundancy into networks so that packets can take alternative routes if part of your network goes down.

Making greater use of software-defined networking may also improve network reliability by making it easier to identify and mitigate failures using software controls instead of physical networking equipment.

Other Data Center Uptime Challenges

Fires and information security incidents also feature on the Uptime Institute’s ranking of data center outage causes – but just barely. They account for 3% and 1% of all outages, respectively.

Of course, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t bother investing in fire mitigations and cybersecurity protections. But if you’re trying to decide which types of data center uptime risks to prioritize, the data shows that these shouldn’t be the only actions on your list.