What is Downtime?

Downtime is best described as a period in which a system, device, or application’s core services, both internal and/or external, are unavailable or idle for a certain amount of time due to updates, maintenance, safety precautions, and even unexpected outages.

As the adoption of cloud computing continues to encourage innovation across industries, high-performing and resilient systems have become a necessity in order to keep pace with the competition and consistently adhere to internal/external SLA’s. In terms of customer expectations, a minute of downtime can mean thousands of dollars in lost opportunity for companies big and small. At retail giant Amazon, the direct revenue loss resulting from a recent outage has been estimated at about $5 million for every hour of downtime. That’s serious money.

With customer expectations at an all-time high, seconds of latency or downtime can mean a loss to the bottom line. In turn, downtime can also negatively impact companies from a reputational perspective. In a world of hyper-accessibility, where almost everyone is a digital citizen, one viral tweet or customer review can soil an entire company reputation within hours. To better understand the impact of downtime in the perspective of the customer experience, consider this table depicting annual downtime based on overall availability:

Availability %	Annual Downtime
99.8%	17.52 hours
99.9%	8.76 hours
99.95%	4.38 hours
99.99% (“four nines”)	52.56 minutes
99.999%(“five nines”)	5.25 minutes
99.9999%	31.5 seconds

^{Source: “High Availability”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/high_availability}

One one-hundredth of a downtime percentage can mean the world to your customers. How many nines can you commit to your customers? To learn more about what you can do to help reduce downtime and keep your customers happy, check out the PagerDuty platform and try it today.