Jim Nielsen argues that uptime percentages are a poor way to communicate service reliability to non-technical audiences, noting that 99.9% and 99.99% look similar but represent a 10x difference. He suggests status pages should display actual downtime duration alongside percentages, e.g., '12 hours affected in the last 30 days.'
Background
With AI and cloud services becoming ubiquitous, more users encounter service outages daily and visit status pages, making reliability communication a broader audience concern beyond infrastructure teams.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Sep 4, 2026 at 04:30 AM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10