Business Impact of Broadband Downtime

In the inter-connected business world  of the 21st century, the importance of your business broadband has never been greater. Increasingly, businesses are dependent on not only the speed of their broadband connection, but also on its reliability. If you have, for example, an online shop, every single minute that your connection is down could be costing you money. 

And it can be said for certain that downtime does cost businesses money. A 2023 study by Censuswide found that UK businesses lost over 50 million hours and £3.7bn due to internet failures in 2023, with SMEs being the businesses most negatively affected by it. This reliance means that ‘downtime’ - the amount of time that your connection may not be working - is of critical importance if you’re to maintain your edge in increasingly competitive marketplaces. 

What is an Internet Outage?

So, what actually is an internet outage? In short, it's a disruption to the broadband connection to your business, meaning that users cannot access the internet. This may prevent them from browsing websites, sending emails, using social media, or accessing other online services which could be vital to the running of your business.

An internet outage can be caused by many different factors. It could be a result of a technical issue such as faulty equipment or damaged wiring. Power outages can also cause them, as can criminal activities such as cyber attacks. In worst case scenarios, they can even be caused by natural disasters. And the scale of them can vary considerably, from complete service failures to temporary or intermittent disruptions. 

How Do Internet Outages Happen?

Internet outages can be caused by a number of issues, including hardware failures, software issues, network congestion, and weather. More extreme situations may include censorship, cyberattacks, disasters, police or security services actions or errors.

The effects can be massive. British Airways experienced a massive IT failure in 2017 over the end of May bank holiday weekend, which resulted in grounded 672 grounded flights and tens of thousands of stranded customers. The cost to BA for this failure was estimated to be £58m. 

Common Causes of Internet Outages

Internet outages can come from a number of different causes, and they run the full range of severity. Here are some of the most common. 

Infrastructure Issues

Modern connectivity comes from an enormous infrastructure with a lot of potential points for failure. Cables can get damaged. In the case of fibre optic cables, they’re quite delicate. Servers require a lot of power to run and need to be kept cool. They’re generally robust, but should they fail the ramifications can be not-insignificant. 

Weather Events

Sometimes weather conditions can have an effect on your internet service, particularly your WiFi connection. Rain, high winds and extreme heat can all cause issues that you should be mindful of so that you are able to take any precautions and ensure you maintain a stable network. Extreme weather can also cause service disruption in other ways, by damaging infrastructure or even damaging the national grid. 

Cybersecurity Threats

Malicious actors can pose risks to the stability of your connection. DDoS (Deliberate Denial of Service) attacks, in which servers are flooded with information until they reach breaking point, remain common, while malware can also cause outages. In 2024, global disruption was caused by malware following a Crowdstrike update. 

ISP Failures

Your internet service provider can be the cause of outages. An outage could be a fault with internal systems run by the provider, between the provider's broadband exchange and the cabinet on your street, or sometimes even due to overwhelming internet traffic in the area. All of these issues would mean multiple customers would be affected at once.

Power Outages

Sometimes it’s a disruption to the very electricity that is necessary to power all this infrastructure in the first place that is the cause of outages. Both local and regional electricity supply issues can cause significant disruption. 

Human Error

Possibly the biggest risk to the stability of your business broadband could be us. Human error, running the full spectrum from misconfigured settings to accidental disconnections. A 2024 survey of 84 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) found that a vast majority said that human error was their organisation's biggest worldwide cyber vulnerability.

Impact of Broadband Downtime on Businesses

So, what are the costs of broadband downtime for your business? Well, that depends to a point on the nature of your business and the extent of the outage, but they may include some of the following. 

Financial Losses

Not all of the impact of broadband downtime is financial, but a lot of it is. Common impacts of internet outages include lost sales, delayed transactions, and operational downtime.

Productivity Drops

At a time when businesses use cloud-based software as a matter of course, your staff may not even be able to work in the event of an internet outage. Teams will be unable to collaborate through calls or access essential tools.

Customer Dissatisfaction

Your customers will expect your business to be online, so outages can be a major cause of dissatisfaction. Missed deadlines or service issues can cost you dear in terms of your relationship with the people you need the most. 

Reputational Damage

Reputation matters and word spreads, in this day and age. Gaining a negative reputation due to a perceived unresponsiveness can be damaging for your business, and in a competitive marketplace it can prove difficult to claw that back. 

Data Vulnerability

Data vulnerability outages occur when a weakness in a system is exploited by malicious parties, causing a system to fail and exposing sensitive information, leading to an increased risk of data loss if offline systems are exploited. 

Strategies to Minimise the Impact of Internet Downtime

The good news here is that there are strategies that you can introduce to help to minimise the impact of internet downtime, thereby bettering your chances of being able to keep on going should an outage occur. 

Backup Connectivity

Have you got all your connection eggs in one basket? If your entire business runs entirely on one connection, it might be time to have a look at backup connectivity as a strategy to minimise the impact of internet downtime. Investing in secondary connections such as 4G/5G backups will allow you to keep working in the event that your primary broadband provider has issues. 

Load Balancers

A load balancer is a solution that acts as a traffic proxy and distributes network or application traffic across endpoints on a number of servers. Load balancers are used to distribute capacity during peak traffic times, and to increase reliability of applications. They improve the overall performance and stability of your network by decreasing the burden on individual services or clouds, and distributing traffic during service disruption.

SLAs with ISPs

Not all internet service providers are created equal. Some are cheaper than others, some promise more by way of services than others. But whatever they are or aren’t offering, that they are consistently providing the broadband you expect and need is critical. Choose providers with robust Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for better protection.

Cloud-Based Solutions

Not all cloud-based services just fall in on themselves as soon as the broadband goes down. Some have offline capabilities which may be worth your consideration should you feel as though your business regularly needs to work offline because of outages. 

Disaster Recovery Plans

Larger organisations should always have a disaster recovery or business continuity plan. These outline what happens should the worst happen; should, say, your entire office burn down or be affected by extremely bad weather. These plans can be very detailed, outlining backup locations and who would have what responsibility under such circumstances. 

Broadband resilience is important. Just as there are greater opportunities out there in our connected world, so those very connections become the air that we breathe, in business terms. We simply cannot afford, in just about any sense, to lose it for long if we need it to keep our businesses as lean as they can be. You’ll be safeguarding your business operations by looking deeper into it straight away!