Million-Dollar Outages Aren't Just IT Problems — They Reveal Critical Leadership Failures

Every sales pitch, prescription refill, and supply-chain update rides on a single strand of connectivity. Snap that strand, and momentum collapses. Staff are then left asking why leadership never planned for the obvious.

Recent surveys bring the risk into sharp relief: 90% of enterprises now peg an hour of downtime at more than $300,000, and 41% put the damage between $1 million and $5 million. Some large firms even lose upward of $10 million in a single month of recurring outages.

Downtime Is a Leadership Issue, Not an IT Problem

Distributed organizations love to tag outages as “technical glitches,” but those glitches usually trace back to planning blind spots the org chart pins on executives, not engineers. A regional clinic that moves to telehealth without investing in redundant bandwidth isn’t facing a fiber cut—it’s facing an executive decision to shortcut risk assessment.

Likewise, a national retailer that centralizes its point-of-sale traffic through a single ISP isn’t unlucky when a backbone fails because the truth is, it’s under-led. Customers abandon carts, clinicians defer diagnoses, and employees lose faith when the lights flicker—failures that the leadership could have preempted with foresight. When outages can siphon more than $10 million a month from revenue streams, labeling them “IT problems” is a costly evasion of duty.

Three Signs Your Growth Strategy Rests on Fragile Infrastructure

First sign: the internet budget lags behind head-count growth. Fast-paced expansions often add remote hires faster than they add reliable circuits, which leaves video consults to buffer at the worst moments.

Second sign: vendor monoculture. Relying on a single last-mile provider, especially in rural or medically underserved regions, turns one truck taking down a pole into a nationwide blackout. Contract diversity and path redundancy are as mission-critical as a balanced customer portfolio.

Third sign: visibility gaps you only notice during the post-mortem. If your operations dashboard can’t tell you which site, provider, or application hit the floor within seconds, you’re running blind. By the time a regional manager flags the outage, the digital cart abandonment or appointment cancellations are already booked and unrecoverable.

Run these checks quarterly, not after a headline-making incident. Every expansion plan should finish with two questions: “What fails when the internet does?” and “Who signs the purchase order that prevents it?”

Translating Operational Resilience into Real Value

High-reliability sectors already treat connectivity like oxygen. Leading hospital systems pair dual-carrier fiber with cellular failover to keep imaging files and EHR data flowing, because a dropped packet can delay a diagnosis. National grocery chains mirror that discipline by routing loyalty apps and payment traffic over separate circuits, so a regional fiber cut never reaches the register. ITIC’s 2024 survey shows why such rigor pays—hourly outage costs in verticals like healthcare and retail can top $5 million.

Resilience always translates directly to revenue, compliance, and trust. Patients who never notice a switchover and customers who breeze through checkout don’t care which circuit handled the traffic. They remember only that your brand never blinks.

What Reliable Systems Mean for Talent and Retention

Uptime is culture. Remote nurses who spend shifts reconnecting to telehealth portals, or store associates who reboot registers while lines snake down aisles, quickly lose faith in leadership. Conversely, steady networks free teams to focus on what you actually pay them for—care, service, innovation. Productivity metrics rise, yes, but so does loyalty. That confidence ripples outward. It trims onboarding time, reduces shadow IT workarounds, and tells employees their late-night ideas won’t vanish behind a spinning wheel. When teams no longer brace for outages, they volunteer projects, share more data across silos, and collaborate across time zones without hoping the VPN holds.

Operational resilience also tells recruits that leadership invests in systems that safeguard their work and reputations, something job ads can’t. In a labor market where skilled clinicians, cybersecurity analysts, and store managers have options, that message lands like a signing bonus.

Building the Habit of Resilience

Resilience is the quiet confidence your people carry when they know the lights will stay on. Start by tracing each mission-critical task back to the cable or circuit that supports it. Then ask in plain language, how long the business can breathe if that link fails. Invite independent testers twice a year to yank the cord in a controlled drill and present the verdict directly to the board.

Between those drills, give every location a simple rule to prove the backup path works before pitching the next expansion. Protect a small, fixed slice of the budget for redundancy, and defend it when cost-cutting fever hits. Most importantly, track “time to restore” with the same urgency you track margin and churn, so leadership feels downtime in the gut, not just the numbers.

Momentum survives only when leaders treat resilience as an operating craft and bake it into expansion plans, hiring calendars, and investor briefings.

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Greg Davis, CEO at Bigleaf Networks, has served on the Bigleaf Networks’ board of directors since 2020. He has a consistent track record scaling businesses and creating enterprise value through revenue growth, operational performance, and strategic acquisitions. Greg’s technology leadership career spans more than 25 years, where he has led multiple companies from start up to over $100 million in annual revenue. Prior to Bigleaf, Greg served as COO at HungerRush, a national leader in hospitality software. Prior to HungerRush, Greg spent eight years as EVP of Sales at Alert Logic, where he led sales, marketing, and other key area of the business.