Unplanned downtime costs UK manufacturers up to £736 million a week, survey finds
Aaron Blutstein 31 October 2025 
UK manufacturers are losing up to £736 million every week due to unplanned downtime, according to new data released by Fluke Corporation. The findings highlight significant vulnerabilities in industrial resilience, with nearly seven in ten manufacturers reporting outages in the past year.
The research, conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Fluke, surveyed more than 600 senior decision-makers and maintenance professionals across the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. It found that 68% of UK manufacturers suffered unplanned downtime in the past 12 months, revealing what Fluke describes as a “silent crisis” in operational reliability.
The study shows that downtime is both frequent and prolonged. Nearly half (46%) of UK respondents reported between six and ten downtime incidents each week, while 15% said they experience 11 to 20 incidents weekly. In terms of duration, 45% said outages last up to 12 hours, and 17% reported incidents stretching to as long as 72 hours.
At an average cost of £1.36 million per hour, a single incident could result in losses of up to £49 million – equivalent to powering 3900 factories for a week.
While the frequency and duration of downtime are similar across the three countries surveyed, the cost impact is notably higher in the UK and Germany. In both markets, a single incident can cost up to £49 million, compared with a global average of £1.27 million per hour and £31.9 million per incident.
The research indicates that downtime is a global operational challenge and a board-level risk to profitability and resilience. However, it also suggests that UK manufacturers face significantly higher costs than their US counterparts, pointing to what Fluke calls a critical gap in Europe’s industrial resilience.
The problem is particularly acute among large enterprises. Globally, 40% of organisations with more than 50,000 employees reported experiencing between 11 and 20 downtime incidents each week, and half said these incidents lasted up to 72 hours.
Despite the scale of the issue, Fluke’s findings show that the manufacturing sector’s response remains fragmented. UK manufacturers are distributing digital investments across several technologies aimed at improving resilience, including predictive maintenance (12%), digital twins (12%), and condition monitoring (13%).
Parker Burke, Group President at Fluke, said: “Our research paints a sobering picture: manufacturers are caught in a cycle where downtime eats directly into competitiveness, and too many are stuck with fragmented fixes.
“The data makes clear that the frequency, duration, and cost of downtime expose systemic vulnerabilities in maintenance and reliability strategies. What once was viewed as an operational inconvenience has become a risk to enterprise value. Without a clear path to scale digital investments, manufacturers’ efforts risk being spread too thin to deliver meaningful resilience or return.”
He added: “The findings underscore the urgent need for manufacturers to rethink reliability not as a maintenance issue, but as a boardroom priority critical to growth, competitiveness, and customer trust.”
All amounts in GBP have been converted from USD using an exchange rate of 0.75 on 23 October 2025.
