The power goes off at half past two on a Tuesday. Card payments stop, the phones go quiet, and half the team is sitting in front of a dark monitor wondering whether the file they were working on saved. Someone calls the network operator and is told it will be back within the hour. An hour sounds manageable, so everyone waits.
The waiting is rarely the expensive part. For most UK businesses, the real cost of an outage sits in everything that has to be put right afterwards: the orders that did not go through, the customers who could not get an answer, the equipment that came back on in a strange state, and the deadline that has quietly moved a day closer. A few dark hours can turn into a week of catching up when there is no plan in place.
This article looks at why a temporary loss of power becomes a business risk, and what can be put in place now to shorten the recovery.
Why Losing Power Is Rarely a Short Problem
A modern business does not simply pause when the electricity stops. It stops mid-transaction. Payments are half processed, calls are dropped partway through, cloud sessions time out, and anything running locally is cut off without warning.
The scale of the cost surprises most leadership teams. New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast, reported by IT Supply Chain, put the median cost of a high-impact IT outage at $2 million an hour, roughly $33,333 for every minute systems stay down, and found that more than a quarter of UK and Ireland organisations deal with one at least once a week. Manesh Tailor, the company’s EMEA Field CTO, called the findings “a wake-up call for UK and Irish organisations”, pointing to the reputational damage that repeat outages cause alongside the lost revenue.
Those figures come from large organisations, and a small firm will not lose anything close to that in an afternoon. The pattern still holds: the loss is not measured by how long the power was off, but by how long the business took to get back to normal.
The Knock-On Effects That Follow the Outage
It helps to separate what stops during the outage from what it costs afterwards, because the second column is where budgets actually get hit.
| What stops during the outage | What it affects afterwards |
|---|---|
| Card terminals and tills | Failed transactions, abandoned sales, manual reconciliation |
| Phone lines, internet and messaging | Missed enquiries, unanswered customers, silence clients notice |
| On-site servers and local files | Unsaved work, corrupted files, restore time for IT |
| Lighting, heating and refrigeration | Stock losses, staff sent home, hours paid for no output |
| Door entry, alarms and CCTV | Security gaps, insurance questions, manual checks on reopening |
| Production and workshop equipment | Wasted materials, recalibration, surge damage found days later |
Hybrid teams can soften some of this, since people working elsewhere keep going while the office is dark. That only works if the systems they rely on are not sitting in the affected building, which is one of the quieter arguments for the shift we covered in The Future of Work.
Practical Ways to Reduce the Impact
Preparation does not need to be elaborate. It needs to be written down and known by the people who will be in the building when it happens.
Identify What Has to Keep Running
Work through the business and mark each function as critical, important or able to wait. Taking payments and answering customers usually sit at the top. Reporting and internal admin can usually wait a day. This list shapes every other decision, including where any backup power is worth pointing.
Write Contingency Procedures People Can Follow in the Dark
A plan that lives on an intranet nobody can reach is not a plan. Keep a printed copy with the essentials: who to call, how to report an outage on 105, which systems to shut down safely, how to take payment or record orders manually, and when to send staff home. Walk a new starter through it once and the gaps show up quickly.
Protect Equipment, Data and Supply
Surges on restoration cause more equipment damage than the outage itself, so surge protection on anything expensive is worth the cost. Keep backups off-site or in the cloud rather than on a machine under a desk, and check that ageing hardware is not the single point of failure, a theme we return to in Tech Upgrades Every Business Needs to Make. If you lease your premises, check the agreement for who is responsible for the building’s supply and any shared backup, one of the details covered in Avoid these 7 Mistakes When Leasing Office Space.
It is also worth knowing where you stand with your network operator. Ofgem sets guaranteed standards that require operators to restore supply within 12 hours outside severe weather, with a £195 payment to business customers when they do not, and a further £45 for each additional 12 hours. That payment covers very little of a day’s trading, which is why the planning matters more than the compensation. For sites where even a few hours offline is unacceptable, companies such as WBPS supply standby generators and temporary power across London, generally arranged in advance as part of a continuity plan rather than called on during an incident.
Agree How You Will Communicate
Decide now who tells customers, who tells suppliers and who tells staff, and make sure at least one channel works without mains power or office wifi. A short message saying you are affected and when you expect to be back protects more goodwill than silence followed by an apology.
Getting the Lights Back On Is Only Half the Job
That Tuesday afternoon outage will cost something whatever happens. What a business controls is the gap between the power returning and the work genuinely resuming. A list of critical functions, a printed procedure, protected data and a way of reaching people turn an outage into an inconvenient afternoon rather than a week of recovery. It is worth an hour of planning on a day when the lights are still on.
