Internet outages cost the UK economy £7 billion in 2016

Organizations in the UK have had a total of three days of Internet outages in 2016 each, according to a new report by Beaming. The UK economy lost £7 billion because of it, while companies lost productivity and had to cover for extra overtime.

More than 75 percent of companies polled for the report say they experienced at least one connectivity failure that stopped them from accessing crucial services. In 2016, on average, a company suffered four outages, waiting six hours for each one to be fixed.

Some companies managed to use the downtime to get other tasks done, while others switched to alternative connections. More than a third (38 percent), however, have had their day-to-day operations "grind to a halt."

"Internet failures can happen for all sorts of reasons, including malicious attacks, poorly configured routers or simply not using products that are appropriate for business," comments Sonia Blizzard, managing director of Beaming.

"As businesses grow, it becomes more important to put in place the right capacity, to have the ability to scale quickly and to protect networks from cyber attacks. Any organization with more than 10 internet users should be monitoring their systems for emerging problems and have experts on hand that can help immediately at the first sign of a problem."

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