UK and Irish organizations are outperforming the rest of EMEA in tackling IT outages – but are still facing massive costs.
According to research from New Relic, 26% of UK and Ireland businesses are hit by high-impact IT outages every week, compared with an average of 37% in EMEA.
UK and Ireland engineers said they were spending 25% of their time fire-fighting or addressing disruptions, taking focus away from developing new features or coding innovations.
And the costs are significant, with high-impact outages carrying a median cost of $2 million per hour, with the UK and Ireland reporting between $1 million and $3 million per hour.
For the UK and Ireland, the annual median cost of high-impact IT outages is $38 million per year. But, alarmingly, 34% of UK and Ireland respondents said they either don't know or aren't tracking the financial impact of outages. The EMEA average is 23%.
"Our latest findings are a wake-up call for UK and Irish organisations, which are severely underestimating the business cost of IT outages," said New Relic EMEA field CTO, Manesh Tailor.
For UK and Ireland organizations, the top three causes of high-impact outages are network failure, third-party or cloud provider services failure, and someone making a change to the environment.
Tool sprawl is a big problem, with 33% of UK and Ireland organizations citing too many monitoring tools and siloed data as a barrier to achieving full-stack observability, compared with the regional EMEA average of 27%.
As LLM-powered applications and agentic AI become more widely adopted, they introduce new visibility challenges. But, said the researchers, organizations are becoming aware of these challenges - indeed, AI is now the top driver of demand for observability.
The use of observability's AI monitoring capabilities in the UK and Ireland rose from 35% in 2024 to 45% in 2025, with only 5% of UK and Ireland businesses saying they weren't deploying or planning to deploy AI monitoring.
And UK and Ireland businesses are good at realizing productivity gains through observability, with 49% of practitioner respondents saying observability has helped free up time to work on other projects, significantly higher than the 34% EMEA average.
Just over four in ten said observability increases productivity by finding and resolving issues faster, up 12% on 2024. Strangely, though, perhaps, 20% aren't tracking the ROI of their observability investments, compared with 10% in EMEA.
"Organisations that aren't investing in observability not only risk huge revenue losses, the reputational damage from frequent outages is equally, if not more concerning," said New Relic EMEA Field CTO, Manesh Tailor.
"The data is clear: companies that embrace intelligent observability across their entire technology stack experience less downtime, fewer critical outages, a faster time to resolution, and increased operational benefits, enabling them to achieve their core business goals."
Make sure to follow ITPro on Google News to keep tabs on all our latest news, analysis, and reviews.
MORE FROM ITPRO
-
From real-time to reasoning: Why NoSQL is core to agentic AIIndustry Insights As businesses race to integrate AI into their operations, many are hitting the same stumbling block: their data infrastructure wasn’t built for it
-
Harrods rejects contact with hackers, after 430,000 customer records stolen from third-party providerNews The luxury department store has denied any link to a failed attack on its systems in May
-
BCS thanks IT staff for CrowdStrike workCEO Rashik Parmar says IT teams are often underappreciated, but have been working flat out to deal with the outage.
-
US voter traffic crashes New Zealand immigration siteNews The INZ website sees a 2,500% increase in traffic following Trump's shock win
