Technology outages can cost Australian businesses nearly $10,000 a minute on top of longer-term reputation damage, according to studies, meaning the push to improve operational resilience is a high-stakes game.

Australia has been hit by multiple incidents post-COVID, including a four-hour outage at the Reserve Bank of Australia in October 2022 that disrupted 800,000 transactions worth almost $1 billion, and took down more than 85 Australian banks. The 2023 Optus outage was estimated to have cost the economy as much as $2 billion after affecting 10 million retail customers and 400,000 business customers.