Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
3 hours ago
- Uptime percentages near 100% are misleading because the difference between, say, 99.9% and 99.99% is a 10x reduction in downtime, similar to earthquake magnitude scales.
- Infrastructure professionals understand this via shorthand like 'two nines' or 'four nines,' but average users of status pages do not.
- The author argues that status pages should present downtime in human-friendly terms, such as '12 hours affected in the last 30 days,' instead of just percentages.
- The goal is to make reliability information accessible to non-experts, who simply want to know how much a service has been down recently.