Uptime
The percentage of time your service is available and working — 99.9% uptime means ~8 hours of downtime per year.
Think of it like
A diner open 365 days a year except for a few brief closures for maintenance.
Example
99.9% uptime = 99.9% of time, 0.1% downtime = 43 minutes downtime per month.
How it actually works
Uptime is usually measured per month or year. Higher targets (99.99% = 4 minutes/month, 99.999% = 26 seconds/month) require redundancy, fast failover, and careful deployment. Each 9 costs exponentially more. Most AI services target 99.9-99.95%.
For product teams
Higher uptime targets justify higher prices — enterprise customers pay for it.
For engineers
Redundancy, automated recovery, and safe deploys are how you achieve high uptime.
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