UK businesses lost more than 50 million hours in internet downtime last year, resulting in losses of more than £3.7 billion.
According to a report by the specialized business ISP Beaming, there were 8.8 million failures on the Internet during the year. And while that marks a decrease from the 60 million hours lost to downtime in 2018, costs have quadrupled from £742 million.
“Increased use of faster, stronger and more resilient forms of connectivity has helped reduce downtime, while downtime has become much more costly,” said Sonia Blizzard, CEO of Beaming.
“Good planning, increased capacity services and expert support are now vital to reduce the risk of internet failures and the associated financial consequences.”
Businesses are more reliant on internet access than in 2018, with four in ten now saying they would lose money in an eight-hour internet outage, up from a third in 2018.
SMBs were hardest hit by internet outages in 2023, with an average of three to four outages and 19 hours of downtime each. Those who work a standard eight-hour day and five days a week, Beaming said, lose more than two workdays a year due to downtime, which equates to about 1% of their productive time.
The hospitality, IT and manufacturing sectors experienced the highest levels of Internet downtime and also suffered the greatest financial impact. On average, hospitality businesses lost 27 hours due to downtime in 2023, while businesses in the IT industry lost around £555 million due to connectivity failures.
“The adoption of digital technologies has been a lifeline for business survival and a driver for greater prosperity in recent years, but this has come with an increased reliance on connectivity,” Blizzard said.
“Businesses are demanding more than ever from their connectivity, and those that rely on e-commerce, automation and public cloud services incur the highest costs due to Internet downtime.”
Recent research from Uswitch found that Southampton was hardest hit by broadband outages between summer 2022 and summer 2023, with an average of 63.2 hours online lost over the year. Meanwhile, Londoners lost just 13.5 hours.
“Despite significant price increases at the beginning of the year, the problem of broadband outages appears to be getting worse,” said Uswitch broadband expert Ernest Doku.
In a survey last year, altnet provider Neos Networks found that one in five UK businesses receive inadequate broadband speeds. More than one in ten said this was affecting their profitability and almost all said it was affecting their productivity, staff retention or collaboration with customers.
Last December, the government published an update to its £5bn Project Gigabit program to deliver high-speed broadband to the whole of the UK. It said eight in ten UK premises can now access a gigabit-capable network, with Ofcom predicting the figure will reach around 90% by May 2025.
