product · May 22, 2026

Cisco Announces Splunk Research: Global 2000 Downtime Costs Reach $600 Billion Annually

Cisco announced on May 19, 2026 the release of Splunk’s The Hidden Costs of Downtime research conducted in partnership with Oxford Economics. The study surveyed 2,000 executives from Global 2000 companies across 20 countries and found aggregate unplanned downtime costs surged to $600 billion annually, a 50% increase over two years and nearly twice the 2024 level. Average per-minute downtime cost reached $15,000 with organizations experiencing an average 3.4% stock price drop after a single incident; ransomware payouts averaged $40 million and regulatory fines $51 million per organization. Kamal Hathi, SVP and GM of Splunk at Cisco, stated downtime is inevitable but prolonged disruption is not.