$1.8 million per hour: New Relic report highlights the staggering cost of high-impact IT outages

New Relic, today published its Observability Forecast for Financial Services, which uncovers how the industry is adopting observability in response to frequent IT outages, increasing enterprise AI usage, and regulatory, security, modernization, and competitive pressures. Drawing insights from 156 IT and engineering leaders at financial services companies—including banks, financial technology, insurance companies, investment firms, and credit unions—the report is based on data from New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast.

The innovation tax: Frequent downtime erodes revenue and productivity

Financial services companies report that high business impact outages cost $1.8 million per hour on average, in line with the cross-industry average of $1.7 million per hour. Outages are also frequent in this industry, with 29% of respondents reporting high business impact outages at least weekly, only slightly lower than the all-industry average of 35%. Network failures are the most common culprit of outages (37 ...