Uptime Institute’s eighth annual outage analysis found good news and bad news for data center operators worldwide. The Annual Outage Analysis 2026 report found that outage prevention remains a focus for data center operators. Driven by escalating demand growth and the need to support AI-driven workloads, modern data centers can ill afford any kind of power outage. Hence, the survey’s finding that outage frequency on a per-site basis has been declining for five straight years is welcome news. NERC has documented large-load reduction events of approximately 1,500 MW, including events involving data centers and other power-electronic loads.