In my day we just committed seppuku if our uptime dropped below three-nines. I was always pushing to get my elusive 5th on a high traffic SaaS site I was lead on for many years.
I remember sitting in a Chaos Engineering conference session in Vegas (2009 or 10) while logged into 12 servers on my moto droid via tmux because someone pushed a bad patch while I was out. I just don't understand why I look back at that fondly.
More simply, replace uptime with downtime.
99% uptime and 99.9% uptime seem close.
1% downtime and 0.1% downtime is clearly a 10x difference.
The whole point of status pages is to minimize and deflate the impact. The pleasantly-high percentages even during absolute catastrophes is an intentional design feature. The percentages are not going anywhere. The percentages will continue until reliability improves. Which it won't.
Also: uptime percentage must be computed as the intersection of uptime across services, not the union.
GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime. We say something like: GitHub Actions: 12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime).
Normal people have no understanding of percentages or numbers, I agree saying 12 hours of downtime is more useful, but I’m also tired of trying to contextualize numbers for the numerically illiterate.
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