Member Article

Internet outages cost UK businesses £12billion last year

Two thirds of UK businesses experienced internet connection failures in the last year that prevented them from trading or accessing vital online services, costing them £12.3 billion in lost productivity and extra overtime, according to new research conducted by Beaming, the specialist business ISP.

Beaming’s study of more than 500 businesses using a range of internet providers and connectivity services found that 72 per cent of businesses – approximately 3.9 million enterprises nationwide – experienced internet downtime during working hours in the year to 31 March 2016. The companies affected suffered 43 hours of lost connectivity and losses of £3,125 each on average, the equivalent of £521 per employee.

Beaming’s research showed that businesses relying on consumer internet services suffered double the downtime (30 hours on average) experienced by users of business connections (16 hours). Despite this, half (51 per cent) of micro businesses and 80 per cent of sole traders continue to use broadband services designed for home use.

While more than one in ten businesses (13 per cent) manage internet outages by switching to alternative connections and a quarter (25 per cent) mitigate some downtime by moving to non-internet related tasks, day-to-day operations grind to a halt at more than a third of businesses (38 per cent) when their internet connection fails. A quarter (23 per cent) of business studied said that they were forced to remain open for longer to catch up with time lost due to outages.

“Internet failures happen for all sorts of reasons, including equipment failures and malicious attacks,” said Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming. “All businesses that use the internet should have a plan to ensure connectivity is restored quickly and that any disruption is minimised.The quality, reliability and consistency of service and the availability of technical support should be as important to business buyers as speed of service.”

13 per cent of businesses studied said they started losing money immediately in the event of an outage. The proportion of firms suffering a financial impact rises to more than a quarter after an hour (28 per cent) without connectivity and almost half (46 per cent) after four hours.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Taylor .