Office workers are increasingly annoyed that IT departments are unable to keep up-to-date with evolving technology and threats, a new report suggests.

According to Richmond Systems, one in three office workers said that their biggest irritations during their day are IT problems and downtime.

These sorts of problems were more annoying for workers than long queues, poor customer service or even traffic jams.

The study revealed that 30 per cent of workers were annoyed by server failures leading to IT downtime. Broken mobile devices - such as Blackberries - irritated 20 per cent of staff.

"IT problems still seem to be the bane of everyday life and companies should be doing more to rectify this," explained Eric Wright, the managing director at Richmond Systems.

"If the technology fails, you have little choice but to sit around and wait for it to be fixed. This can be frustrating and costly, especially when under pressure from work deadlines."

Companies could avoid IT problems by outsourcing their IT support services and even considering disaster recovery systems.