Costs to the U.S. Economy of Information Infrastructure Failures: Estimates from Field Studies and Economic Data

The U.S. economy increasingly relies on the internet as a critical infrastructure for enabling business processes from product design, engineering and supply chain management upstream through sale and fulfillment of product downstream. As a result, there is much interest in the vulnerability of the U.S. economy to targeted and large-scale disruptions of the information infrastructure. Here we present results from field and modeling studies that estimate the macro-economic costs of a targeted internet outage in three economic sectors: automobile manufacturing, electrical device manufacturing, and oil refining. Firm-level estimates of productivity loss from outages of varying duration were used as input into a Leontief-based input-output model of the U.S. economy to estimate the total economic impact of outages from 3 day and 10 day’s duration.