In defense of GitHub's poor uptime

In short: GitHub’s downtime is bad, but uptime numbers can be misleading. It’s not as bad as it looks; more like a D than an F. “Zero nines uptime”? 99.99% uptime, or “four nines”, is a common industry standard. Four nines of uptime is equivalent to 1.008 minutes of downtime per week. GitHub is not meeting that, and it’s frustrating. Even though they’re owned by Microsoft’s, one of the richest companies on earth, they aren’t clearing this bar. Here are some things people are saying: “GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability” “World’s First Enterprise Solution With Zero Nines Uptime” “Sure, they may have made the uptime worse, but remember what we got in exchange – when it’s up, the UI is slower and buggier.” According to “The Missing GitHub Status Page”, which reports historical uptime better than GitHub’s official source, they’ve had 89.43% uptime over the last 90 days. That’s zero nines of uptime. That implies more than 2.5 hours of downtime every day! I…