How much did Bradesco's Friday cost?

How much did Bradesco's Friday cost?

Earlier today, Bradesco was unavailable for almost 4 hours. Second outage in two weeks.

When something like this happens, there's a question that rarely comes up in public but that any tech leader should ask bluntly: How much did it cost?

The calculation almost no one makes

A bank outage isn't just a technical headache. The damage spreads:

1. Direct cost Unexecuted transactions, lost fees, breached contracts.

2. Operational cost Full war room, support at its limit, overtime, blocked deliveries.

3. Reputation cost Customers opening accounts at competitors, NPS plummeting, negative headlines that stay on Google forever.

4. Opportunity cost Entire team fighting fires instead of advancing the roadmap.

Add all this up and repeat it a few times a year, and the number always hurts. It just doesn't show up as a clear line in the budget.

The resilience paradox

Most companies treat prevention unevenly:

→ The cost of prevention is visible. It's in the spreadsheet, in headcount, in the tool that needs renewal.

→ The cost of failure disappears from view. Until the day it blows up — and then the narrative becomes "unforeseeable event".

This imbalance weighs heavy: engineering needs to justify every investment in prevention, but no one needs to justify the loss from an avoidable outage.

Resilience isn't superfluous spending. It's protection against losses that are almost always bigger than they seem.

In the financial market, no one questions insurance after a fire. But in technology, curiously, many leaders still treat availability of critical systems as something "negotiable".

The right question

It's not "how much does it cost to invest in QA/Resilience?".

It's: how much risk do you take on when you don't invest?

A simple way to measure

In your next budget discussion, align three numbers with your team:

→ How much is one hour of the system running worth? → How many hours were you down in the last 12 months? → How much was invested in prevention in the same period?

If the loss from outages is greater than the investment, there's no savings there. Just accumulated risk.

The final question

Do you know how much one hour of your system being down costs?

If the answer is "no", that's the first item on the backlog.