What if your systems, or a vendor's, go down?

Two kinds of downtime

Cyber business interruption pays for the income you lose when a cyber event stops your business from operating. There are two versions, and the second is the one almost nobody has. The first is your own systems going down. The second, dependent business interruption, is when a vendor or platform you rely on goes down and takes your revenue with it.

Standard property business interruption does not respond to either, because there is no physical damage. This is a cyber-specific coverage.

Dependent system failure, the coverage nobody knows they need

Most small businesses now run on a platform they do not own: a booking or point-of-sale system, a dispatch or transportation management platform, a property management system. When that platform has an outage or an attack, your business stops even though nothing happened to your own network.

Dependent business interruption and dependent system failure coverage is built for exactly this, and it is frequently missing from smaller policies. If your revenue depends on a system you do not control, this is the coverage to confirm.

How it is sized

Business interruption coverage turns on a waiting period and a daily value. The waiting period is how long the outage must last before coverage starts, and the daily value reflects what a day of downtime actually costs you. Sizing both honestly is the difference between coverage that helps and coverage that technically exists.

This is the page that matters most for trucking, restaurants, and property owners, because all three run on platforms they depend on.