When it comes to quantifying the costs of IT downtime, Gartner’s oft-cited benchmark — $5,600 per minute — equates to over $300K per hour. Although many organizations rely on the long-standing calculation, recent reports show medium and large businesses are actually losing approximately $9K per minute ($540K per hour) in 2025. Much of this leakage is attributable to the “Doom Loop,” which refers to a cycle where rushed or incomplete incident response leads to a chronic lack of preparedness that compromises the ability to respond effectively to future incidents.  

The problem starts with a common process gap that leads to the same incidents for the same services repeating into perpetuity. Because remediation teams are caught up in the urgency of detecting and restoring service, post-mortem root cause analysis and improvements to runbooks don’t happen. Ultimately, this results in a self-perpetuating decline in the quality of incident handling capabilities overall — at scale, this complex problem opens the door to substantial risk and financial implications.  

If your company is dealing with these challenges, you’re not alone — in fact, industry insiders speculate 4 out of 5 organizations are repeating the same IT failures multiple times. This situation is directly attributable to a lack of processes and tooling that promote implementation of the right fixes (e.g., systemized root cause analysis and continuously updated runbooks).  

Acknowledging Misalignment of IT Operations and DevOps 

In many cases, the root cause of the Doom Loop cycle is attributable to the disconnect between traditional IT operations and modern DevOps.  

Historically, IT operations teams have prioritized efficiency, process adherence, control and compliance, whereas DevOps teams have focused on rapid iteration, flexibility and business alignment. Because these functions have different objectives and success criteria, your teams may experience business friction.  

Generally, IT operations and DevOps teams are good at detection and triage. However, when incidents occur that force them to converge, siloed thinking and actions persist despite the DevOps philosophy, which refers to rapid adaptation to changing business needs to deliver value with speed and reliability.  

Because these teams have evolved separately, their concerns, communications, processes and tools may clash and obscure clarity for who’s responsible for various aspects of incident detection, escalation and resolution. This leads to conflict, costly delays and gaps in remediation, which is especially problematic during high-stakes incidents.

Revealing the Hidden Cost of Incidents 

Incident management response processes reside at the intersection between business operations and technical infrastructure. On a practical level, this means remediating an incident requires cobbling together multiple teams with diverse perspectives and skills, and no clear ownership of end-to-end resolution.  

How does this play out?  

Say an enterprise online retailer experiences a breakdown in automated pricing systems that leads to a catastrophic financial disruption. The issue is related to the advertising engine, which serves millions of product listings to various platforms, such as Google. Due to a misalignment in one of the caching servers, Google crawls and indexes an inaccurate price.  

Because Google maintains a strict policy of validating advertised prices against those listed on the website, the discrepancy triggers an automatic penalty: All the retailer’s ads are pulled from the platform, and sales fall off a cliff. 

Response to the Priority One incident is immediate, and an incident commander from IT operations takes charge, bringing 20 of the most experienced (and expensive) talent from multiple teams into the war room, pulling them away from their primary duties.  

For the next 72 hours, the cross-functional team works together to locate the problem, which happens to be a single out-of-sync caching server. Restarting that server solves the problem instantly — but only after three full days of diverted resources, lost revenue and organizational disruption.  

The incident caused significant resource drain, but the core issue was not the fix itself, but rather what followed. Post resolution and celebration, the team disbanded and moved on.  

Although the root cause analysis (RCA) was acknowledged, no meaningful post-incident action occurred because there was no system of accountability. No one was responsible for verifying the caching logic was updated, ensuring the monitoring rules were tightened, or confirming the runbooks were current — therefore, the cycle was bound to repeat itself.  

Systemizing Root Cause Analysis 

Many organizations are wrestling with systemic institutional barriers that undermine effective RCA efforts.  

For example, people get immersed in the backlog, which is both a symptom and cause of inadequate incident management protocols. Organizations stuck in the Doom Loop of recurring incidents cannot often execute RCA because they’re constantly working in crisis mode, which means their staff can’t get ahead. Subsequently, there’s no time or mindshare applied.  

Manual and ad-hoc processes also detract from effective RCA, because these approaches result in missed data, sub-par investigations and unreliable outcomes. Standardized, automated workflows ensure consistency, completeness and speed of incident resolution by removing human error and bias.  

Inadequate documentation can be a root cause of both incident recurrence and failed RCAs. Without clear and current runbooks your teams will waste time rediscovering solutions and miss critical context for RCA. Investing in robust documentation practices and dynamic runbooks provides the hyper-current information they need to resolve incidents quickly and perform RCA.  

When there’s no clear ownership of RCA, corrective actions fall through the cracks and root causes remain unaddressed — this lack of accountability can lead to a culture that accepts superficial patches instead of complete elimination. In contrast, forward-thinking companies are exploring automated solutions that enforce accountability during and after incidents. This measure guarantees incidents are fully resolved, and root-cause fixes are in place to prevent recurrence.  

Adopting the Virtuous Cycle 

If your organization is serious about escaping the Doom Loop, you can reframe your approach by implementing a “Virtuous Cycle,” which refers to transforming incident management from chaotic to controlled. Preparation is foundational to making this change, as is automation and AI-enabled tools.  

When your teams use automated workflows and dynamic runbooks, they can dedicate their talents to high-value tasks. AI-enabled anomaly detection can accelerate issue identification, and clear ownership models eliminate ambiguity. Intelligent automation contains issues before they escalate, and enforced follow-through ensures closed-loop verification that fixes are tracked to completion.  

IT and DevOps team members understandably dread getting pulled into incident management issues because they risk falling behind on their regular duties. However, when your teams are working in a culture that creates space for active participation while working within modern tooling and processes, you will achieve better outcomes.  

Overall, you’re wise to focus on moving beyond siloed thinking and a culture of reactivity. If you implement the right tools and promote a modern mindset, your teams can shift their focus from incident management to prevention — this will make your teams more resilient and valuable to your business.