As a small business owner, you have to ensure that your business is fully operational every single day. This means every facet of your business needs to work exactly when you need it to, the way you need it to and as fast as possible. Business continuity is a key part in keeping you successful, and Internet connectivity is the most critical part of keeping your operations up and running. Simply put, very few small businesses can remain operational, profitable or even open during an outage.

It has been found that on a yearly basis around 90% of businesses experience at least one outage. Causes of these outages come from a variety of issues, some you may have thought of, and others you may have never considered. Let’s take a deeper look into five of the more common causes of outages for small businesses.

• Weather/Power Outages – This is probably the most common reason for outages. Events like thunderstorms, tornadoes, earthquakes or even just high winds can cause your power to go out, resulting in downtime for your business. In 2015, there were 3,571 power outages that occurred for a variety of reasons. So, it should come as no surprise that with this many power outages in a year, weather is a leading cause in disrupting business continuity.
• Human Error – While we all try to be perfect, we know that is not that case. And quite frequently simple human error leads to outages for companies – for reasons like having an employee try to act as an IT professional to a worker accidentally tripping over the power source. From simple causes like these it has been reported that nearly 25% of all outages are a result from internal human error.
• Equipment Failure – Many small business owners are looking to grow into larger, even more successful businesses, yet they are forgetting one thing – to update their equipment as they grow and as technology changes. Equipment failures and other equipment problems contributed close to 40% of all reported downtime in a recent study. With this knowledge, small business owners should focus on keeping up with their network equipment as much as they do with the rest of their business.
• Overloaded Networks – If you consider yourself a small business with not many employees, then you may have a network only capable of handling so many people connected at once. But what happens when your employees have two to three devices connected to the network and you bring in clients that need to connect as well? Your network is going to overload. If this results in your network going down then your reputation can be tarnished.
• Cut Cables – Fiber optic cables are probably rarely on the mind of a small business owner, in fact the only time you may ever think of these cables is when one actually gets cut resulting in an outage. This is a rarity for sure, but it can happen when construction crews aren’t aware of where the cables are. In March of last year, a construction crew accidentally cut a fiber cable which resulted in outages for thousands of people and their businesses.

These are just some of the main causes of outages, but there are still plenty of others that lead to the disruption of business continuity, which can cause businesses to lose up to $700 billion annually.

What Can You Do?

Since a majority of these causes are not within the control of the business or the owner, the best plan for any company is to develop a continuity plan to get through these outages by using an automatic Internet backup connection. An automatic Internet backup connection will allow you to stay connected to the Internet even during an unforeseen outage, resulting in limited downtime and making sure your business doesn’t become a part of that annual $700 billion loss.

Learn how Comcast Business Connection Pro can help make downtime a thing of the past.

If you think you’re experiencing a Comcast Business service interruption, sign in to the Service Status Center to check your connection status, get troubleshooting tips, and learn how to keep your business connected during an outage.