How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?
I say this every time Slack is down, but they just seem so shady to me. Nobody can connect right now, and their status site says "100% uptime in the last quarter". Maybe it's close to 100%, but it ain't 100%. I think we should push for a metric where "up" means 100% of people that want to use the service are able to use the service. If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and…
Google published a paper last year describing this approach to measuring uptime: https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/26/meaningful-availability/
The idea is to define availability as "the probability that the site 'appeared' to be down for a random user, averaged over a time window of size w". You can choose a particular value of w and look at trends over time, or you can plot availability as a function of w to understand patterns of downtime.