As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.
Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix…
Large companies calculate this value as a “burn rate”, which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it’s ~$1M in losses.
They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.
As an armchair economist, lots of things. Loss of money from workers standing around unable to do their jobs because of the technical issues, the cost of doing a restore from backup (technician time, extra help, direct costs of accessing the data), etc. Opportunity costs from having to send business away, or otherwise unreasonably delay taking/delivering orders that have either been given to competitors or cancelled because of the issues.
Even the dang electricity costs of keeping the lights on while waiting for a fix…
Large companies calculate this value as a “burn rate”, which is to say, how much is it directly or indirectly costing to have everyone here, ready to work, and unable to do so because of an issue that affects everyone. Usually measured in dollars per hour. So if their burn rate is 100k/hr, and it takes 10 hours to fix the problem, it’s ~$1M in losses.
They may be able to recoup some of those losses by adding an extra shift or granting overtime to catch up, but for the most part, a large percent of that money is simply gone.