Service Downtime Tolerance

Discussions center on the acceptability of downtime and outages in online services and SaaS platforms, weighing costs, SLAs, reliability expectations, and examples from companies like Reddit, Cloudflare, and GitLab.

➡️ Stable 0.6x DevOps & Infrastructure
3,712
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#9476
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
9
2008
37
2009
63
2010
98
2011
128
2012
165
2013
183
2014
155
2015
111
2016
166
2017
164
2018
172
2019
203
2020
270
2021
481
2022
339
2023
307
2024
275
2025
371
2026
17

Keywords

HA arcserve.com OP FogBugz DAYS MSP JavaScript TWO DataDog downtime outage hours outages backup cost revenue days service server

Sample Comments

todotask • Aug 22, 2020 • View on HN

Don't understand the downvote, it's a fact that downtime does happen.

leeoniya • Oct 25, 2021 • View on HN

hmm, not sure how many customers would be okay with 7 days of downtime, for instance.

orf • Jun 19, 2014 • View on HN

Why? Because of 10 minutes of downtime?

tspike • Aug 28, 2020 • View on HN

Something tells me an outage will make them think about it

Oculus • Apr 9, 2014 • View on HN

Aren't you worried about downtime? Clients calling @ 2am doesn't sound like a fun time to me.

Denote6737 • Feb 2, 2024 • View on HN

3.65 days of downtime isn't going to be winning any prizes.

rpmisms • Nov 8, 2023 • View on HN

It'll have frequent downtime and nobody will panic when it does.

thejosh • Jul 17, 2013 • View on HN

Wouldn't a delay be better than full downtime?

wongarsu • Jan 6, 2022 • View on HN

He never said they don't care about lost revenue. I am willing to guess they considered the lost revenue, weighed it against the cost of having someone on-call 24/7, and considered that the lost revenue was cheaper.If you look at how frequently sites like Reddit used to have downtime, it doesn't seem to matter too much for consumer products. Having half a day downtime once a year might be completely acceptable.

prmoustache • Dec 10, 2024 • View on HN

It depends on the accepted downtime.