The cost of unplanned downtime increases annually, with businesses in every industry facing potentially devastating costs.
The cost of unplanned downtime increases annually, with businesses in every industry facing potentially devastating costs. The causes of IT outages vary, along with recovery costs, so it’s vital for organizations of all sizes to conduct intelligence and learn from the trends and disasters others have faced in this context.
The risks and likelihood of inactivity increase during peak activity periods. As the holidays approach, it’s especially helpful to look back at last year’s most popular incidents to prevent them as the busiest season of 2025 begins.
For this purpose, the IoT solution provider team Digital infrastructure management provide an overview of major disruptions in 2024 and 2025 in several key areas, including the trends they point to, the costs involved, and what can be gleaned from the implications.
Retail Livestock
One of the most high-profile outages in this industry over the past 12 months involved Ahold Delhaize, a multinational retailer that was cyberattacked in November 2024.
With more than 2,000 stores nationwide, including many Stop & Shop locations and sales exceeded $14.49 billion in the US alone, the attack disrupted both commercial transactions and e-commerce.
Outage tracked to Food Lionone of its sub-brands, the consequences of which affected the organization for more than seven days. This included a trend of problems with its pharmacy services, with customers unable to pay with debit cards in some cases.
In April 2025, the company confirmed in a statement that the downtime caused by the attack also resulted in direct data theft. Criminals reportedly linked to INC Ransom committed the theft as much as 6 terabytes private information.
The group then threatened to sell the data if certain, undisclosed demands were not met. It was later confirmed that 2.2 million people their data was exposed during the attack.
Although Ahold Delhaize’s ransom negotiations during this downtime and the subsequent one have not been made public, it is reasonable to assume that they are in the tens of millions of dollars. IBM’s latest data breach research shows that The average cost of individual incidents is $4.4 million. Along with store disruptions and reputational damage to its subcontractors, the Ahold Delhaize incident is a cautionary tale for the entire industry.
In addition to the potential costs of this outage, it highlights the tendency of interconnected systems to expose retailers to widespread outages, even if the source of the original breach is localized. Once one IT asset is compromised, others can go down or need to be taken offline as a precaution.
During production stoppage
The consequences of failures in manufacturing are just as important and problematic as in retail, and the root causes of the most costly incidents are also shared.
The daily cost of downtime in this area is estimated $1.9 millionwhen ransomware-related disruptions cost manufacturers $17 billion over five years. In terms of duration, ransomware-related outages typically last around 11 days, although the most severe cases can go on for months.
The most obvious example actually comes from 2025, and the full extent of the damage done will take some time to quantify. UK-based carmaker Jaguar Land Rover has suffered after more than four weeks of inactivity cyber attack in Septemberwith losses of more than $68 million per week, its manufacturing operations were at a standstill.
This incident showed not only the staggering costs a company can incur as a result of downtime, but also the consequences of a significant production stoppage that disrupts the supply chain. More than 5,000 companies were affected by JRL’s outages, resulting in cumulative costs; more than $2.55 billion.
A combination of lost profits and recovery costs will affect the manufacturer for half of this total, with the rest going to suppliers, partners and the wider economy.
As with the retail industry, lessons manufacturers can learn from this include the importance of business continuity planning in the face of persistent and urgent cyber threats. While an organization like JRL has the support and brand clout to weather this storm, it is unlikely that smaller manufacturing companies will be able to sit idle for weeks with no chance of recovery.
Agri-food hiatus
Businesses in agriculture and food manufacturing are joining their counterparts in the retail and manufacturing sectors in fighting the rising tide of cybercrime. in fact one report suggests that the agri-food sector experienced a 101% increase in such incidents over the past year, significantly higher than the 38% average for all sectors.
The researchers argue that while it’s usually the multi-million dollar breaches that make the headlines, more attention should be focused on the plight of smaller businesses that suffer the same problems, albeit on a smaller scale.
Again, ransomware remains a primary concern in this area. When IT assets are compromised, regional farmers and food producers can end up paying nearly $5,000 to restore access to mission-critical data. The downtime they experience during infection also creates costs and complications from which to recover.
Recent lessons from downtime
The classes patterned after last year’s most significant outages are the same classes that have been seen in more than a decade of layoffs. Cyber threats are the biggest obstacle for modern businesses, regardless of the industry in which they operate. Failure to protect systems and devices from these threats results in high recovery costs, often running into the millions of dollars even for mid-sized organizations.
Taking appropriate precautions and planning to maintain business continuity when attacks inevitably occur is a necessity for all companies. Some will have to learn the hard way, and these mistakes are definitely useful for others to absorb and avoid.
This story was produced Digital infrastructure management and revised and distributed Stacker.
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