When a Postgres failure happens, the time it takes to recover can mean the difference between a relatively minor hiccup and a major business crisis. We regularly hear anecdotes from our customers on this topic, but we also wanted to gather some data—so we surveyed 50 developers managing 1TB+ Postgres databases in production to find out how long their recovery processes take, what the biggest challenges are, and how downtime affects their business.

What we learned: 

• 59% of companies experienced a critical Postgres failure in the last year.
• Nearly 30% of teams had more than 3 hours of downtime—some pushing past half a day.
• 52% reported negative customer feedback and a huge spike in support cases due to the incident. 
• 26% also had to deal with breach of SLAs and penalties. 
• Only 21% felt very confident in their ability to quickly restore after a failure.
• 68% of teams had faster point-in-time recovery solutions, like Neon’s, on their wishlist.

Stories From Developers: The Impact of Slow Database Restores

If you’re not as experienced in production, you might assume that as long as you “have backups,” you’re covered—but there’s much more to it. A slow, unreliable, or untested restore process can be almost as damaging as having no backup at all.

When you’re evaluating your database and building a playbook for handling failures, don’t forget to look at the bigger picture: what it really means to be stuck with multi-hour recoveries. The anecdotes in the survey reveal just how costly that can be:

Customer frustration and churn

“The most recent database production incident was due to a server failure in one of the data centers, and automatic failover failed to kick in due to a misconfiguration. We had to manually switch over to the other database, which could only be done after the issue was identified, resulting in a lot of failed transactions and unhappy customers.” (Lead Software Engineer, Fintech enterprise)

It can be failed transactions, lost data, or degraded app performance—when your database is down, customers always notice. It only takes a single prolonged outage to erode customer trust. You start seeing higher churn rates and a damaged reputation, especially in industries where uptime is critical. 

Revenue loss from downtime

​​“The team pushed an update to optimize DB writes by tweaking indexing strategies. About 30 minutes after deployment, customers started reporting missing transactions. Replication lag in the replicas meant some users were seeing outdated or incorrect balances. Customer trust was at stake—this was a financial application, meaning real money was on the line” (Lead Automation Engineer, SaaS enterprise)

For apps that rely on real-time transactions (e.g. e-commerce, payments, marketplaces), downtime directly translates to lost revenue. If users can’t complete purchases or access services, the financial losses escalate quickly. A company losing thousands of dollars per hour due to downtime isn’t far-fetched. The longer a restore takes, the greater the hit.

Major engineering disruption

“A database failure caused a significant performance degradation, leading to slow response times for critical applications for around 16-20 hours. The internal team faced mounting pressure, working extended hours to identify the issue, restore backups, and mitigate further delays, resulting in high stress and disrupted workflows across development and operations teams.” (DevOps Engineer, Semiconductors enterprise)

Every hour spent waiting for a restore is an hour your engineering team isn’t shipping new features, fixing bugs, or making progress on the roadmap. Restoring a database under pressure puts enormous strain on engineering teams. These are high-stakes incidents that mean long nights on call and hours of mitigation work across multiple teams (e.g, support). 

SLA breaches

“Our PostgreSQL database suddenly became unresponsive, severely impacting our operations. The issue affected multiple teams, Level 1 support was flooded with complaints, developers scrambled to diagnose the issue. Unfortunately, our failover mechanism could not keep up with the degraded performance, extending the downtime” (System Administrator)

This is another side of the “revenue loss” coin. For B2B SaaS businesses, every minute of downtime increases the risk of breaching SLAs (Service Level Agreements) which can cost thousands of extra dollars per incident, depending on the scale of the business and the contractual agreements in place.

Experience a Faster Recovery Path With Neon’s Instant Restores

If slow Postgres restores are this harmful to companies and teams, what’s the solution? Instant restores—and this is what you get with Neon. We take a fundamentally different approach to Postgres recovery vs traditional managed Postgres like RDS: 

• Neon offers instant PITR based on branching – You can instantly create a branch snapshot from any past state and instantly revert to it. No need to replay WAL or wait for a full database restore.
• Instant even at 100 TB scale – Whether your database is 10GB or 100TB, Neon’s restore time stays the same: seconds, not hours.
• No need for lagging replicas or costly standby instances – Multi-AZ high availability is built into Neon’s architecture, eliminating the need for full-size standby databases.

If you’re ready to see it in action, try it. It takes 1 minute to sign up to Neon, without a credit card.

Neon’s Free Plan is enough to give you a taste of the platform, but if you’d like credits to test out a PoC, tell us. Our team of Postgres experts will be happy to assist you during your evaluation.

18k+ databases per day are being created per day in Neon, with thousands of new costumers joining. Find out why.