this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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I see two nines
Microsoft never promised where the nines would be
0.99%
I see six
I'm stupid what does zero nines uptime mean?
These services measure their uptimes in number of nines, the more the better.
Sometimes the humorous term "nine fives" (55.5555555%) is used to contrast with "five nines" (99.999%),[18][19][20] though this is not an actual goal….
Maybe Microsoft misunderstood the assignment, and thought this was a goal. At their current rate, it’s certainly more achievable than the more traditional “five nines”.
As an aside, I love how the following is preferences as “casual”, and then the author starts arguing semantics:
Similarly, percentages ending in a 5 have conventional names, traditionally the number of nines, then "five", so 99.95% is "three nines five", abbreviated 3N5.[13][14] This is casually referred to as "three and a half nines",[15] but this is incorrect….
the author starts arguing semantics
Legendary levels of pedantry, gave me a real good chuckle 🤭
Being casual does not shield you from your mathematical incorrectness.
Ah makes sense. Thanks
When contracting a service, usually there are clauses that specify that it needs to be fully working and available x% of time, and compensation may be due in case this goal isn't met.
Let's say GitHub was down for 1 full day in the last year, that's 99.7% availability. That's "2 nines", but sometimes people might say "2 nines five", meaning "better than 99.5% uptime".
I'd say that the expectation for a high availability service nowadays is "5 nines": 99.999% uptime. That's around 5 minutes of downtime in a full year. This kind of performance from a site like GitHub is just unacceptable...
Lies! 89.98% has two nines in it!
Thank you, that is much more helpful than OP graph
Move slow and break shit
It's the best of both worsts.
I've worked on services with 5 nines of availability (i.e. 99.999% available, less than 5 minutes of downtime allowed per year). I've more frequently worked on ones with 4 nines, where you're allowed almost an hour of downtime per year. GitHub is now barely maintaining 2 nines. That's just embarrassing.
Each "nine" you add is much more difficult. To get four nines you need people on call who can start working on a problem within 5 minutes and fix it within a few more minutes, and you can only get those calls once every couple of months. Five nines means that you need people at their desks in shifts ready to start fixing something the moment there's a problem because it would take too long for someone on-call to get their computer out, connect and authenticate. It requires warm backup systems that are sitting idle but ready to take over fully at a moment's notice.
A two nines system is allowed to be down for 100x as long as a four nines system, and 1000x as long as a five nines system. It's almost 15 minutes of downtime allowed per day, compared to about 15 minutes every 3 months for a four-nines system. Gamers wouldn't even put up with a two-nines system for a video game. It's absurd to allow that for a critical piece of infrastructure for software.
Five nines means that you need people at their desks in shifts ready to start fixing something the moment there’s a problem
No, it means you don't have outages. Ever.
Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you're deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.
It's takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.
No, it means you don't have outages. Ever.
No, that's infinite nines, which isn't possible.
Five-nines is something like 7 minutes of downtime throughout the entire year. At best, you might have automated failover systems that require tiny outages. No human involvement, though, unless you're deal with some major breakage that would have killed the five-nines commitment that year, anyway.
Yes, you have automated failover systems. But, if something happens which causes those systems to fail over, you need to immediately investigate what happened and why. Even at four nines you have automatic failover, redundant system, hot spares, etc. But, you accept that sometimes not everything will work as planned and you'll need to fix something. Five nines is just that and more.
It's takes a human something like 5-10 minutes just to get out of bed and figure out the situation, anyway.
Right, which is why I said that four nines is your realistic maximum if you're going to have people on call who aren't actually at their desks. To get better than four nines you need to have around the clock coverage with people at their desks so when a system breaks you have eyes on it in something like 30s.
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I’m used to environments where they expect five nines, get 3 (maybe 4) nines, and fund for 1 nine.
I cal bullshit on "Gamers wouldn't put up with a two-nines system for a video game"
Elder Scrolls Online has a weekly scheduled outage for about 8h. Every monday. Players have been complaining about it for years, but game is still popular.
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Obv a gross looking chart, but I am bothered that the left hand scale is trimmed off. I expect those are 10% increments, but wouldn't be shocked if Original was like 99.0, 98.0, 97.0, etc.
You'd be surprised: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
But weirdly enough it feels much worse using gh professionally than the scale makes it seem.
The graph is neat.
Saving some people a click: the cut-off y scale in the OP image is in 0.1% increments. So the lowest point is a little above 99.5%
Thank you! I was thinking "it can't just be me that's bothered"
Nothing to make a point like snipping off the y-axis scaling.
I hate Microslop like any person with > 2 brain cells, but that graph is useless - all visible y-entries end in a 0 - might as well be 99.990, 99.980, 99.970, ...
It's just Xitter's image viewer cropping it automatically; the original upload has it.
It is still bad practice to select a narrow window from a axis like this and show the difference that seems massive relative to what is shown but isn't that significant when we can see the relation to the whole.
Graph 101
This is a commonly known issue with graphs and one that gets repeated without a lot of consideration for context. While it's generally a good basic rule to have graphs show the full vertical axis, it's not like it's a hard rule that needs to be followed 100% of the time. In this case for example, moving from 99.999% (five nines) to 99% (two nines) is a significant effect, it has importance. Displaying the full axis would make that difference unnoticeable and render the graph useless.
Yes I absolutely agree but it has to be transparent and for me it is intentionally misleading to show it like this. Yes, it's still significant and still shows lack of care from microslop but context matters to me. Maybe more than to others :)) I acknowledge that I am special that way and this is fine for others
Surely they could just Copilot their way out of this mess lmao
They are trying ^^
https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
A lot of this is GitHub Actions alone, but a lot of it isn't. I also don't know how well GitHub tracked outages before the Microsoft acquisition. It's entirely possible the graph looks so bad because they only took outage tracking seriously after being acquired. I don't know.
It is impressive how bad Microsoft is fumbling the bag
Github has gotten extremely popular but it also sucks really bad
But the payment processing service has 9 nines of uptime......
I highly doubt it
Is that real? Because that... Makes it real clear...
Remember when mSlop bought HotMail? Same shit, different decade.
How many of those outages were due to AI training?
That's just fucking disgraceful.
You should see what they are doing to Minecraft
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