As I begin writing this, July 19, 2024, there’s been a large outage, with lots of people suffering blue screens of death. Banks, airlines and airports, hospitals, and media outlets – all suffering IT problems today because of a bad software update from a major security company.
“Downtime” is when online applications are not working. This is relevant to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or cloud-based applications and services, which are a major part of how companies operate. This is as opposed to applications/software run “on-premises” – where the company has their own computer room, and not (as) reliant on their vendors’ systems operations.
Contracts for SaaS often include provisions around downtime/uptime. The vendors sometimes provide “uptime guarantees” or service level agreements (SLAs). They will (sometimes) commit to something like 99% uptime per month – meaning that their offering will be up and running, available to the customer, 99% of the month. This translates to only 1% downtime. 24 hours a day, 30 days a month = 720 hours. 1% downtime means 7.2 hours down a month. Anything over that, and that (could) be a breach of contract.
The above is 185 words. I’ll leave it for there for now, but will write additional posts on downtime/uptime, the contractual practices around it, and the business implications. Let me know if you want to know anything specific.
HATR Consulting 
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