Is 6 Days Too Much Annual Downtime? – A Question Almost Too Surprising to be Asked

Silicon Alley Insider asks if six days is too much for annual downtime? It’s a truly amazing question. I am more surprised that in late 2007/early 2008 it is a question that can still be asked by anyone at all.

In one year, 6 days of downtime corresponds to 144 hours of downtime. For those who like their uptime measured in percentages – that corresponds to an annual service availability of 98.3%.

I will repeat again – 98.3% uptime.

As Joe Pendry mentioned in a previous post:

It is hard to find a company that is not striving for the “five nines” of availability across all of their business applications. In fact, business are now demanding “always on” support (or 100% uptime) – a shift in attitudes toward downtime that is giving IT Operations teams everywhere major “agita.”

In late December 2007 – the blogosphere lit afire with the story of downtime statistics for the hot microblogging service Twitter. This was reported by pingdom on December 19th. For those not familiar with microblogging, Jermiah Owyang provides a great primer on Twitter. (If you Twitter, you can follow me here.)

Twitter’s availability problems have been widely covered by users of the service and bloggers over the year. There was even a widely quoted cartoon written describing the babyboom created by Twitter outages providing extra freetime among users. Once the annual availability numbers became available and distributed – literally hundreds of posts were written. Most pin the cause of the availability problems on issues scaling the service. GigaOM relates that fame has led to the Twitter downtime. Similarly, TechCrunch ascribes the Twitter outages to growing pains. An entire conversation even began among passionate “twitterers” over architectural recommendations that might improve availability of the service..

At the end of the day the judgment of the Twitter user community is crystal clear. Twitter users, like all IT service users today, expect technology services to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even a free, web 2.0-based service from an emerging startup like Twitter.

The implications for tech startups are large.

1. Architect for availability and hyper growth from day one – nothing hurts like the public pain of success
2. Understand the key causes of downtime – and prepare to invest in meeting the always-on expectations of your customer base

And let’s hope that in 2008 no one will be asking if 6 days is too much annual downtime any longer.

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Filed Under: Downtime