Manufacturers report millions in losses as downtime wreaks havoc on operations

UK manufacturers are losing up to £736 million every week due to downtime, according to new research, with outages lasting for days on end.

Across the UK, US, and Germany, new data from Fluke Corporation shows 46% of manufacturers reported between six and ten downtime incidents weekly, while for 15% the figure is between 11 and 20.

Nearly half (45%) said outages last up to 12 hours, with 17% reporting that incidents had stretched to 72 hours.

At an average cost of £1.36 million per hour, Fluke said a single incident can equal up to £49 million in losses – the equivalent of powering 3,900 factories for a week.

“Our research paints a sobering picture: manufacturers are caught in a cycle where downtime eats directly into competitiveness, and too many are stuck with fragmented fixes," said group president Parker Burke.

“The data makes clear that the frequency, duration, and cost of downtime expose systemic vulnerabilities in maintenance and reliability strategies. What once was viewed as an operational inconvenience has become a risk to enterprise value."

While the amount of downtime is fairly consistent across the three regions surveyed, there are big differences in costs. At an average of £1.36 million per hour, the cost of a single incident in both the UK and Germany can reach up to £49 million in losses, while the global average is noticeably lower at £1.27 million per hour and £31.9 million per incident.

Globally, downtime is a bigger problem within large enterprises. For example, of those with more than 50,000 employees, 40% reported experiencing between 11 and 20 downtime incidents per week, with half reporting incidents of up to 72 hours.

Despite the scale of the risk, however, the industry remains fragmented in its response. UK manufacturers are spreading their digital investments across multiple solutions in an attempt to build resilience, with 12% using predictive maintenance, 12% using digital twins, and 13% using condition monitoring.

This is a risky strategy, said Burke.

"Without a clear path to scale digital investments, manufacturers' efforts risk being spread too thin to deliver meaningful resilience or return," he said.

“The findings underscore the urgent need for manufacturers to rethink reliability not as a maintenance issue, but as a boardroom priority critical to growth, competitiveness, and customer trust.”

Across UK businesses, more than seven-in-ten UK organizations have had some sort of IT disruption in the last 12 months. According to co-location data center provider Asanti, 51% see cloud service outages as one of the top risks to operations, with 49% identifying traditional IT system failures as another leading risk.

Similar research from New Relic recently found that UK and Irish engineers are spending a quarter of their time fire-fighting or addressing disruptions, taking focus away from developing new features or coding innovation.

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