Stop Showing Me Uptime Percentages—Tell Me How Many Hours You Were Down
Can we stop with the uptime percentages?
Jim Nielsen argues that uptime percentages are a terrible public interface for status pages. While infrastructure engineers intuitively grasp that 99.99% is ten times better than 99.9%, most users see both as an A grade. He proposes replacing 'GitHub Actions: 98.31% uptime' with '12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime)'—a metric anyone can understand.
The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude. Uptime percentages have a similar problem: 99.9% and 99.99% look pretty much the same, but the latter is 10× less!