Survey: Failing Power Infrastructure Causing Outages

Worried about the potential of costly outages caused by your data center’s power systems and equipment?  That’s a wise concern based on the recent experience of your colleagues in the IT infrastructure sector.  

When asked about what has caused data center outages for their organizations in recent years data center professionals most commonly pinned the blame on power infrastructure problems and malfunctions.  That was the biggest takeaway from The Uptime Institute’s 2026 Data Center Resiliency Survey of 1,035 data center industry respondents conducted in Q1 of this year.  

When asked for the most common root causes of their data center power outages over the past three years 39% of respondents cited uninterruptible power supplier (UPS) failure, 34% blamed faulty transfer switches, and 28% referenced generator failure.  A number of other factors were mentioned in Uptime’s survey, which is worth reviewing in its entirety, but the three most common causes of outages involving power infrastructure stood out.

No surprise that some of the gear costliest to replace are the source of so many outages, as whether or not to keep an aging data center alive is a decision that many organizations grapple with.  

That is particularly the case here in Eastern Pennsylvania, where so many organizations exhibited foresight to be among the early builders of company-owned-and-operated data centers in the 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, our region has many data centers several years past their planned lifespan with aging power infrastructure putting their uptime at risk.  

If your organization has an aging data center and is evaluating your infrastructure strategy moving forward a recently released white paper may be of interest to you.  This month Direct LTx published  Replacing Your Aging Data Center?  Reviewing the Options and Strategies Available to You. 

Click here to review it or email strategy@directLTx.com to request your copy.