Infrastructure outage human error has overtaken hardware failure as the dominant reliability threat facing enterprise IT teams, according to Uptime Institute's 2025 Annual Outage Analysis, published May 6. The finding is counterintuitive: even as overall outage frequency dropped for the fourth consecutive year - a sign that hardware investment is working - the operational layer is cracking under the weight of procedural gaps, undertrained staff, and a sharp rise in cyber-related incidents.
Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2025, via CoreSite and McMorrow Reports. Cyber and third-party figures are approximate based on secondary citations.
| Value (% of impactful outages) | Share of impactful outages (%) |
|---|---|
| Power failures (UPS, generators) | 45 % of impactful outages |
| Human error - procedure failures | 40 % of impactful outages |
| Cyber-related incidents | 20 % of impactful outages |
| Third-party / software failures | 10 % of impactful outages |
Overall outage rates fall, but the risk profile shifts sharply
For the fourth year running, Uptime Institute reported that the frequency and severity of data center outages continued to decline globally. That is a genuine win for capital expenditure programs, hardware redundancy builds, and the engineers who run them. Better power distribution, improved cooling architecture, and stricter equipment standards have all contributed to a measurable reduction in raw outage counts.
The problem is that the remaining outages are increasingly tied to factors that better hardware cannot fix. Cyber-related incidents doubled in frequency in 2024 compared to the prior multi-year average, according to the Uptime report. The organization characterized these events as severe and lasting in impact - a different category of disruption from a failed capacitor or a degraded UPS battery.
85% of human-error outages trace back to staff failing to follow procedures - or to the procedures themselves being flawed, per Uptime Institute 2025.
Procedure failures behind most human-error outages
Nearly 40% of organizations reported suffering at least one major outage caused by human error over the past three years, per Uptime Institute's 2025 data, cited in McMorrow Reports' June 2025 analysis. Of those incidents, 85% traced back to staff not following established procedures - or to the procedures themselves being inadequate or outdated.
The picture worsened in the most recent measurement window. The share of human-error outages attributable specifically to procedure failures rose by ten percentage points year over year, according to McMorrow Reports. That trajectory matters to infrastructure leaders because it signals a systemic, not isolated, problem. Runbooks that were written for one operational environment are being applied in hybrid and AI-heavy architectures they were never designed for, and nobody is auditing the gap.
Power still leads, but cyber is closing fast
Power infrastructure remains the single largest cause of impactful outages, responsible for 45% of incidents in the Uptime 2025 data as cited by CoreSite, with UPS failures as the dominant culprit. That figure underlines why generator testing, transfer switch maintenance, and UPS lifecycle management remain non-negotiable budget items.
Cyber-related events are now the fastest-growing category of severe outages, and Uptime Institute's October 2025 blog analysis added critical context: human error was a contributing factor in eight major public cybersecurity breaches recorded between 2023 and 2025. Three of those - affecting UnitedHealthcare, CDK Global, and Ascension - ranked among the ten most significant data center outages in Uptime's records. The pattern is consistent: a cyber incident creates an opening, a human decision amplifies the blast radius.
What this means for CIO investment strategy
The operational implication for enterprise IT leaders is a forced pivot in how resilience investment is framed. Hardware capital expenditure is delivering diminishing returns on outage reduction. The next layer of risk - procedure governance, change management discipline, and staff training - is where frequency and severity can still be moved.
Practical starting points include structured runbook auditing on a defined cadence, formal change management reviews that account for hybrid workload complexity, and closer integration between infrastructure operations and the security function. For organizations running AI-heavy workloads, the blast radius of a single procedural failure or uncontained cyber incident is substantially larger than it was three years ago. Procedural discipline is no longer a soft-skills program - it is a hard infrastructure cost that belongs on the infrastructure budget, not the HR one.
