Uptime
Uptime is the percentage of time a system or service is operational and available, typically measured over a month or year and expressed as a percentage like 99.9%.
In Depth
Uptime is a critical metric for customer support platforms because downtime directly impacts the ability to serve customers. The industry standard is expressed in 'nines': 99.9% (three nines = 8.7 hours downtime/year), 99.99% (four nines = 52.6 minutes/year), and 99.999% (five nines = 5.3 minutes/year). SLAs typically guarantee a specific uptime level with credits for failures.
For AI-powered support, uptime considerations extend beyond the main platform to all integrated systems — if the CRM API is down, the AI agent may not be able to access customer data. Redundancy, failover mechanisms, and graceful degradation ensure that even during partial outages, customers still receive service. AI agents actually improve effective uptime because, unlike human agents, they don't take breaks, call in sick, or have shift changes.
Related Terms
Availability
Availability is the ability of a system to be operational and accessible when needed, encompassing uptime, performance, and the capacity to handle expected workloads.
Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery (DR) is the set of policies, tools, and procedures designed to restore critical business systems and data after a catastrophic event like hardware failure, cyberattack, or natural disaster.
Failover
Failover is the automatic switching to a backup system, server, or network when the primary system fails, ensuring continuous service availability.
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