Why Every Minute Offline Costs.

It a busy start to the week. Teams log on, phones ring, and emails fly… until suddenly everything stops.

That’s what happened twice in October 2025: Vodafone “dropped off the internet” on Monday 13^th, followed a week later by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Over 130,000 reports were recorded for Vodafone, leaving customers offline, while AWS saw more than 6.5 million disruption reports, affecting major banks, retailers and public services.

For commercial landlords and business tenants, the message is simple: when your connectivity drops, so does productivity, reputation and revenue.  

The price of every minute offline

Connectivity is the backbone of modern business, but it’s value goes unnoticed until it is gone:

• UK businesses lost over 50 million hours and £3.7 billion due to internet failures
• Downtime costs have risen by 400% since 2018
• IT-related downtime averages £4,300 per minute
• 82% of companies report operational disruption and reputational damage as well as financial losses.

Why outages happens and why they hurt.

Connectivity outages can result from cable damage (especially on construction sites), ISP network issues, power failures, and/or human error and accidental software/configuration changes. And as buildings get smarter, the consequences multiply.

For tenants, the effects can be immediate:

• Lost communication internally and externally as phones, emails and video calls go down.
• Cloud services, internal platforms and shared drives go offline.
• Payment systems, e-commerce platforms and customer interactions freeze, leading to lost sales.  
• Staff productivity and morale drop, leading to bottlenecks and missed deadlines.

Long-term risks include erosion of client trust, disruption of supplier relationships, delays in project delivery and even contract losses if service levels aren’t met.

For landlords, outages can disrupt:

• Building management systems, lighting, HVAC and smart meters
• Access controls and CCTV
• Lift monitoring and safety alarms and systems  
• Tenant communications and service logs.

Repeated issues also erode tenant confidence, which then drives reputational damage, higher tenant churn, harder lease renewals and the risk of vacant space.

Staying connected: Why a good partner matters

Avoiding downtime requires more than just good hardware. It requires resilient design and proactive management, and that’s where a specialist partner like Curve IT can make the difference.

Form the earliest design stages, we partner with architects, developers and landlords to help create and manage reliable networks suited to the specific needs of the property and its users.  

• Resilient design: Dual routers, multiple fibre links, geographically separate routes and power feeds with battery backups protect networks against any single points of failure

• Advanced monitoring: Multiple monitoring systems proactively detect, investigate and resolve potential faults before they can escalate.

• Fast, transparent support: Our in-house support desk provides clients with clear communication channels and rapid responses directly from our engineers.

• Proactive maintenance: Daily automated backups, patch management and scheduled updates keep systems stable and secure, protect critical data and minimise any required downtime.

• Tailored, end-to-end service: Every technological detail of a building’s IT infrastructure is considered and designed to be reliable and adaptable as technology evolves, ensuring long-term service stability rather than short-term costly fixes.

With Curve IT, you are not just another account in a call queue. You gain a partner that is invested in your connectivity and your success.

“Always on”

When the internet goes down, productivity, trust and revenue go with it. And in an “always on” world, resilient IT infrastructure and the right partner are invaluable for protecting your buildings and business.

Curve IT work with architects, contractors and landlords to design and maintain networks that keep buildings and business tenants online, productive and satisfied – no matter what.

Talk to us today about your next development project.

References

• BBC News, (2025), Vodafone says outage affecting thousands of customers resolved
• The Times, (2025), Amazon, Snapchat and Ring ‘recover’ after AWS went down – as it happened
• Beaming, (2023), The Cost of Internet Downtime – The impact of outages on UK Businesses in 2023
• Clyk, (2025), The Real Cost of Downtime for UK Businesses
• IT for Less, (2025), The True Cost of Downtime: Stats Every Business Should Know