// THREAT DETECTION AND DATA PRIVACY TERM
Outage
An outage is a period when a system, network, or service is completely unavailable and stops functioning. It can be caused by anything from a cyberattack like a denial-of-service attack to a simple hardware failure.
TECHNICAL DEFINITION
In cybersecurity, an outage refers to the complete unavailability of a system, application, or network service, often triggered by a malicious event such as a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, ransomware encryption, or critical infrastructure failure. Incident response teams measure the impact of an outage using metrics like Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) to guide business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) efforts.
BACKGROUND
On Monday, 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST, a major power blackout occurred across the Iberian Peninsula affecting mainland Portugal and peninsular Spain, where electric power was interrupted for about ten hours in most of the Peninsula and longer in some areas. The power cut caused severe difficulties in telecommunications, transportation systems, and essential sectors such as emergency services. At least seven people in Spain and one in Portugal may have died due to outage-related circumstances like candle fires or generator exhaust fumes. The total disconnected load was 31 GW.
READ MORE ON WIKIPEDIASYNONYMS & ALIASES
- downtime
- unavailability
- service interruption
- system failure
- disruption
- service failure
USAGE NOTE
It's crucial to differentiate an 'outage' (total failure) from a 'degradation' (slow performance) for accurate incident severity assessment.
DEVELOPERS
Organizations developing technology related to Outage.
Develops a global cloud network that provides web security, DDoS mitigation, and content delivery services to protect websites and applications from attacks that could cause service outages.
Provides cloud services and a global content delivery network (CDN) with advanced DDoS protection solutions like Prolexic, designed to absorb and mitigate the largest network attacks to prevent downtime.
Specializes in network performance monitoring and cybersecurity, offering solutions (formerly Arbor Networks) that provide visibility and DDoS attack protection for service providers and enterprises to maintain service availability.
Focuses on industrial cybersecurity (ICS/OT), developing a platform to safeguard critical infrastructure like power grids and manufacturing plants from threats that could lead to catastrophic physical outages.
A U.S. federal agency that leads the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to cyber and physical infrastructure, providing tools and guidance to prevent outages of critical services.
An incident management platform that helps organizations detect, respond to, and resolve IT outages and security incidents in real-time, minimizing downtime and business impact from events like cyberattacks.
Offers cybersecurity solutions including Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and advanced DDoS protection to safeguard critical applications and data, preventing service disruptions and outages caused by malicious traffic.
Provides a portfolio of application delivery and cybersecurity solutions, including real-time DDoS mitigation technologies designed to protect data centers and applications against network and application downtime.