A survey of leading US businesses sponsored by Stratus Computer Inc of Marlborough, Massachusetts, which has an interest in spreading alarm and despondency about these things, suggests that computer downtime cost the country at least $4,000m in lost productivity and revenue last year; and with 75% of respondents indicating that their business are becoming increasingly reliant on computing systems this figure look set to grow. The sample comprised 450 information system executives from major corporations in the telecommunications, travel and transport, insurance, manufacturing, banking, securities, and retail industries who were questioned about the costs and other impacts of online computer system failures. The results showed that businesses lost $3,400m in annual revenue due to computer failure. An average hourly revenue loss of $78,191 was identified though some individual companies put losses at $500,000 plus. Further significant costs resulted from lost productivity with 37.3m lost hours (translatable into more than $400m if you take the average hourly wage as $10.53); 60% of companies included overtime costs, and 7.6% added fines to their expenses. It was found that customer dissatisfaction and lost productivity due to computer downtime were considered to have a greater impact than the quantifiable loss of revenue due to downtime. Lost customers, dissatisfied corporate management, and lost data also were deemed significant. The findings also indicated that, on average, computer systems crash nine times per year, per company and that those systems stay down for an average of four hours.
