Incident Costs by Severity
Understanding how severity affects cost helps teams prioritize prevention investments and design appropriately sized response processes.
Complete service unavailability or data loss. Revenue generation is stopped or severely impacted. Affects all or nearly all customers/users.
Impact Metrics
Cost by Org Size
$10,000 - $100,000 per incident
$200,000 - $1,000,000 per incident
$1,000,000 - $10,000,000+ per incident
Common Examples
- +Primary database failure causing complete application outage
- +DDoS attack taking down customer-facing services
- +Payment processing system failure
- +Critical security breach with data exposure
Standard Recovery Actions
- +All-hands incident bridge (engineering, product, exec)
- +Customer communication within 15 minutes
- +Vendor escalation for infrastructure issues
- +Real-time status page updates
- +Post-incident review within 48 hours
Major functionality degraded but partial service available. Significant customer impact with workarounds limited or unavailable.
Impact Metrics
Cost by Org Size
$5,000 - $40,000 per incident
$50,000 - $300,000 per incident
$200,000 - $2,000,000 per incident
Common Examples
- +Significant latency increases affecting checkout flows
- +Core feature unavailable for a subset of customers
- +API failures causing third-party integration failures
- +Backup/secondary system failure while primary is healthy
Standard Recovery Actions
- +Dedicated incident bridge with engineering lead
- +Customer communication within 30 minutes
- +Stakeholder notification to leadership
- +Status page update indicating degraded performance
- +Post-incident review within one week
Partial service impact affecting a minority of users or non-critical functionality. Workarounds typically available.
Impact Metrics
Cost by Org Size
$500 - $5,000 per incident
$5,000 - $50,000 per incident
$20,000 - $200,000 per incident
Common Examples
- +Specific feature unavailable for subset of users
- +Reporting or analytics service degraded
- +Non-critical third-party integration failures
- +Performance degradation in low-traffic regions
Standard Recovery Actions
- +Engineering lead and relevant team members
- +Internal stakeholder communication
- +Status page advisory if customer-visible
- +Resolution tracking in incident management system
- +Lightweight post-incident notes
Minimal service impact. Single user or edge-case issues. No or negligible revenue impact.
Impact Metrics
Cost by Org Size
$100 - $2,000 per incident
$500 - $10,000 per incident
$2,000 - $50,000 per incident
Common Examples
- +Single user account access issue
- +UI bug in rarely-used feature
- +Performance issue in internal tooling
- +Non-critical scheduled job failure with no downstream impact
Standard Recovery Actions
- +On-call engineer or responsible team
- +Ticket created and tracked
- +Resolution within SLA without escalation
- +Closed ticket with resolution notes