Despite the percentage decrease, the number of major tech outages caused by security issues actually rose from 3 in the 1980s to 20 in the 2020s.

August 12, 2025

Despite the percentage decrease, the number of major tech outages caused by security issues actually rose from 3 in the 1980s to 20 in the 2020s. — This cybersecurity statistic was published by Website Planet in August 2025. It covers topics including Tech outage. The original data appears in Global Tech Outages: The High Price of Small Errors. For the full methodology and detailed findings, refer to the original report.

Source

View Original Report

Published on 8/12/2025

Share or Copy this stat

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this statistic say?

Despite the percentage decrease, the number of major tech outages caused by security issues actually rose from 3 in the 1980s to 20 in the 2020s. This data was published by Website Planet and covers Tech outage.

Where does this data come from?

This statistic comes from Global Tech Outages: The High Price of Small Errors, published by Website Planet on August 12, 2025. You can view the original report at https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/global-tech-outages-research/.

What cybersecurity topics does this cover?

This statistic relates to Tech outage. Browse more statistics on Tech outage or from Website Planet.

CYBERSTATS

Despite the percentage decrease, the number of major tech outages caused by security issues actually rose from 3 in the 1980s to 20 in the 2020s.

Source

Share or Copy this stat

Frequently Asked Questions

Want More Statistics Like This?

Related Statistics

Security breaches are identified as one of the five most frequent root causes of major tech outages, collectively accounting for nearly 90% of all major outages alongside software bugs, configuration issues, database errors, and infrastructure failures.

Security incidents have resulted in an estimated cumulative $29.4 billion in losses from the 38 incidents considered in the dataset.

Sectors like energy and utilities face more security breaches compared to other types of failures

In the first half of the 2020s (so far), security issues are behind 24% of the 82 failures catalogued.

When combined with configuration and deployment errors, security breaches account for 34% of outages.

In the 1980s, security breaches and cyberattacks were responsible for 50% of the 6 outages recorded during that decade.

Browse by Topic

Stay Ahead of Cyber Threats