Causes of Data Center Outages and How to Prevent Them

Perhaps you’ve been here: You need to ship a massive, rush order to a key client, but just as you’re about to hit “SEND,” your logistics solution goes dead. What if it’s not just a system error? What if the problem is actually far worse? What if the whole data center hosting the logistics solution has gone down? This article discusses such episodes, known as data center outages, looks at their causes, and shares best practices for preventing them.

Data Center Outage Meaning

A data center outage occurs when a data center is unable to function, either partially or entirely, for any number of reasons. This can lead to downtime for services reliant on data centers.

Whether your data center is a small server room, a facility holding a couple of hundred servers, or a gigawatt hyper scale site over a million square feet in size, they all can run the risk of not functioning correctly. The servers, storage devices, and network hardware comprising the data center’s infrastructure can break down or get damaged during an outage, meaning the facility cannot process and store data accurately.

This is not to be confused with a system outage. In contrast, a system outage refers to the impact of a piece of software or hardware failing. This discrete unit of computing may go down, but the rest of the data center that hosts it can continue to operate.

The Frequency and Severity of IT Infrastructure Interruptions

Data center outages are relatively common. In fact, 55% of data center operators experienced an outage in the last three years (via Uptime Institute). And, while only 10% of those outages were “Severe” or “Serious,” any outage is problematic.

9 Causes of Data Center Outages

​Keeping in mind that a data center is a highly complex set of interdependent physical and software systems, it is somewhat surprising that serious outages are not more frequent. A lot can go wrong in a data center — and we have selected the nine most common causes.

1. Power Failure

Data centers need a great deal of electricity. With all the power-hungry computer hardware and cooling systems, a data center typically uses 150-300 watts of electricity per square foot. That’s 10 to 50 times more power than a standard commercial building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

This energy usage is also only growing, as AI workloads are now demanding 30+ kw per server cabinet, which is 600w per square foot. Higher density racks can use even more, as much as 100kw per cabinet, which equates to 10,000w per square foot.

A data center power outage is a major cause of data center outages. The same Uptime Institute report shows that 52% of power outages in data centers are due to electrical problems.

A power outage could be caused by a variety of factors. The disruption may occur due to a fault in the power grid, i.e., a “blackout.” Or, it could be the result of a failure in the data center’s electrical equipment.

2. Malfunctioning Hardware

There are three core types of equipment in a data center. One is the hardware that hosts clients’ systems, e.g., servers and storage arrays. Another is computer hardware that runs the data center, such as for administering the infrastructure and operating its electrical and cooling systems. The third is the electrical and cooling equipment itself.

If the latter two types of hardware malfunction, the data center can experience an outage. For example, if the electrical connectivity system fails, the data center will cease operating until a backup power source comes online.

3. Human Error

People run data centers, usually assisted by specialized administrative software. As is the case with any human-operated system, errors and misconfigurations can lead to unexpected problems.

This potential was displayed in the notorious 2011 “mirroring storm” that took Amazon Web Services (AWS) offline for over a day. That IT infrastructure outage in the cloud was caused by a misconfiguration in data center management software.

4. Cooling Failure

Power outage data center damages are not the only energy-related problem IT managers run into. It has been found that 19% of data center failures were due to problems with cooling systems.

This issue arises because computer hardware generates a significant amount of heat, take microprocessors in server equipment for example. For this reason, infrastructures can employ a variety of data center cooling systems, such as liquid cooling technology, including immersion cooling or direct-to-chip.

If the cooling system fails, the hardware in the data center will quickly overheat and shut down—or even catch on fire or melt. Data center managers will switch off equipment rather than face this extreme risk, causing an outage in the process.

5. Environmental and Natural Disasters

The abstract nature of the cloud can hide the fact that data centers are physical buildings that are vulnerable to the elements. While their sites are often selected because they are in low-risk areas for natural disasters, some risks remain.

Old assumptions may also no longer hold. In 2024, for instance, a region of North Carolina that rarely floods experienced catastrophic flooding during a hurricane. The flooding damaged the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) data center in Asheville, North Carolina, which is the world’s largest repository of environmental data.

6. Fire

Data centers are vulnerable to outages due to fire. Servers run hot and If they’re packed too densely on the racks, server hardware can fail and even can catch fire.

Fire suppression systems, which are mandatory, can stop a data center accident based on fire, but having a fire can itself causes the data center to go offline.

7. Cyber Attack

Data centers are attractive targets for malicious actors that seek to disrupt business or government operations. A cyber-attack can thus be the cause of IT infrastructure blackout.

In particular, hackers could target the data center management systems that control the infrastructure and network—leading the data center network outages.

8. Software Failure

Software that runs data centers can fail, causing unplanned disruptions. This is particularly noteworthy for environments that are software-defined, like hyperconverged infrastructures.

Software issues can stem from misconfigurations, undetected flaws in the code, incompatibility with operating system upgrades. Integrations between data center management applications, such as connections linking cooling system management and electrical management systems, can also create risks of software failure.

9. Third Party Cause

In some cases, data center failure or outages comes from a third party, with 8-9% of outages being based on the actions of third-party providers.

These include electrical, cooling and mechanical contractors, as well as services that help with backup and restore, network management, and cybersecurity. In the latter case, a managed security service provider (MSSP) might respond to a cyberattack by shutting down systems that run the data center. This could be the correct decision, from a security standpoint, but the result is still an outage.

The Cost of Data Center Outages

Unplanned data center outages can be damaging. They trigger actual financial losses, but there are also non-monetary consequences of an interruption. Data center outage costs can be reputational damage, legal liability, data loss, and others that are suggested below.

1. Organizational Reputational Damage

Data centers are typically a hidden element of the digital customer experience. A properly functioning data center drives fast application response times and reliable data storage. They host software and data that make the digital world a reality. However, When they go down, they take digital experiences with them. Suddenly, customers cannot buy things from e-commerce sites, and they cannot access systems that enable them to transact business.

This has the potential to damage the reputation of the company. For instance, as far as the e-commerce customer knows, the online store is down, they don’t know it’s the data center, so they elect to shop elsewhere.

2. Data Loss

A severe IT infrastructure outage can result in a loss of data. If storage arrays are destroyed by a fire, for example, and there is not adequate backup, the data is gone. This can have a negative and costly impact on a business.

3. Business Disruption

Most businesses today are highly reliant on information technology to function. Whether it’s online ordering, customer relationship management (CRM), or enterprise resource planning (ERP), such systems support business operations.

If the data center that hosts them goes down, the business cannot function. The result may be a nuisance, or something more serious, like the loss of a customer or employee data.

4. Negative Financial Impact

When a data center goes offline, expenses start to mount. The cost of data center outages varies based on circumstances and the size of the data center in question, but it can be damaging. Research shows that when calculating the cost of data center outages, 70% cost more than $100,000, with a quarter of them costing over a million dollars to remediate.

The cost of downtime can be extreme, and it can be made worse. If a data center charges fees for hosting based on time, then lost time is also lost money. The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) puts the figure at between $1 million and $5 million per hour.

5.  Legal Liability

If an outage is severe, data center hosts can be caught up with legal matters in the aftermath. This can be for many reasons, but primarily, an outage can result in a breach of a service level agreement (SLA).

SLAs, such as a guarantee that a server will have an Uptime of 99.99%, are negotiated into data center hosting contracts. If the data center breaches the SLA, there can be legal penalties.

6.  Compliance Problems

Data centers that fail can cause problems with regulatory compliance. If there is data loss, for example, that could cause a company to run afoul of regulations like the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), which mandates retention of corporate records for a fixed period of time.

How to Prevent Unplanned Data Center Outages – 6 Tips

​It may be impossible to prevent severe data center interruptions entirely, but a few best practices can decrease their frequency and severity.

1. Redundant Power Systems

Data center redundancy power systems are essential for reducing the probability and impact of a IT infrastructure outage.

A backup generator can kick in if the main power supply goes down. Uninterruptable power supply (UPS) units enable hardware to operate temporarily without interruption if there is a loss of power.

Generators and UPS’s are common backup solutions for most data centers. The challenge is to provide redundancy that can survive long-term outages. This may require layers of UPS backup and going beyond even “worst case” generator scenarios,

2.  Maintenance and Testing

It is essential to maintain data center hardware, to ensure equipment performs well and lasts beyond the OEM EOSL date. Additionally, it is a best practice to test equipment for maintenance issues on a regular basis.

This is an organizational and operational challenge. Specialized software with hardware monitoring capabilities can help by enabling “predictive analytics” that anticipate equipment failures.

3. Failover

Failover systems ensure that if your data center experiences an outage, you can instantly divert traffic to a “mirror site” that has the same systems installed.

Cloud computing has made the establishment of mirror sites for failover dramatically easier than it once was.

4. Disaster Recovery Planning (and Testing)

Plan for data center downtime, if you don’t, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised by the inevitable.

This can be part of your organization’s broader disaster recovery (DR) planning process. The best practice is to prepare data center power outage procedures and a data center power outage checklist to work from when there is an outage.

The checklist should cover action steps, including:

• Notifying key people in the organization, e.g., the legal team and senior management.
• Summoning any required external resources, e.g., electrical contractors or air conditioning repair services.
• Notifying customers.

Testing the plan and practicing the response process is a very good idea. The experience may reveal that contact phone numbers are out-of-date or that procedures no longer match the equipment in the data center.

5. Cybersecurity Countermeasures

Cybersecurity controls and countermeasures can help prevent data center outages by blocking or quarantining attack vectors that seek to take the data center down.

This involves steps like making sure that cybersecurity tools for endpoint detection and response (EDR) are applied to the devices that run the data center, among other proactive protection practices such as network data loss prevention tactics.

6. Training

Given the potential for human error to cause data center dowtime, it makes sense to invest in training people on ways to avoid such outcomes.

If IT infrastructure managers are properly trained in overseeing the complex, interdependent systems that make the data center run, they will be less likely to make mistakes that lead to outages. The same goes for cyber threats to Uptime.

Minimize the Risk of Downtime with Park Place Technologies

IT infrastructure outages are commonly caused by an issue with management and current data center practices. Park Place Technologies optimizes infrastructure performance, meaning you don’t need to worry about downtime and can focus on key business strategies instead.

We have a range of services that can help circumvent interruptions. Our third-party maintenance offering keeps your IT assets healthy and long-lasting, minimizing the risk of any hardware failures. While our networking monitoring tool, Entuity Software™, allows you to keep a keen eye on network performance and issues that can lead to downtime, not to mention identifying any security issues.

We can also help with the management of your IT infrastructure 24/7, and identify and triage any data center issues before they escalate into something more serious.

Reach out to Park Place Technologies today to learn more.