Downtime describes a period where an application, server, or system is unreachable or unavailable. This can happen during outages or cyber attacks, but can occur due to planned maintenance, updates, misconfigurations, data deletion, or a number of other reasons (both intentional and unintentional).
Application availability is a zero-sum game, so to speak. Any downtime your application experiences will directly reduce uptime, and therefore influence answers to the question, "Are we available enough to meet our users' needs?"
What are the downsides of downtime?
To better understand downtime, it's important to recognize how desirable the concept of "five-nines" (99.999%) availability is to organizations. Touted as the gold standard for high availability—yet famously difficult to achieve—this goal exemplifies how seemingly minuscule periods of downtime can have serious business impacts. 2018's infamous Amazon Prime Day outage, for example, lost the company an estimated $72 million to $99 million in sales despite lasting roughly an hour.
Downtime can certainly impact eCommerce revenue to varying degrees, which is a metric we often consider first while evaluating the impacts of downtime. However, other measurable (and unmeasurable) consequences of downtime can impact both organizations and end users:
Loss of access to vital systems powering patient medical recordkeeping, government SNAP/EBT benefits, personal banking, and more
Customer friction and reputational damage
Growing numbers of social media complaints
High volumes of support tickets
Decreased productivity and collaboration
Violations of SLA agreements
Missed business opportunities
Regulatory penalties
This isn't an exhaustive list, but highlights how the potential negative consequences of downtime are varied and far reaching.
With downtime comes issue remediation. Getting servers and applications back online can be a relatively-simple process, but it can also be painstakingly difficult and highly dependent on the initial cause(s) of such outages. This is especially true from a technical standpoint. However, clear communication and frequent updates are often required to keep customers informed throughout the process.
Today's users expect modern applications to run smoothly, with low latency and minimal interruptions. While there's some room for downtime across a service's lifetime, any notable outages are likely to cause frustration. Research has found that 90% of users have stopped using a poorly-performing app in the past. Additionally, 88% of online customers are less likely to return to a website following a bad experience. The drivers of those bad experiences can certainly vary, but performance and availability are major pillars of application consumption.
Can HAProxy help prevent downtime?
Yes! "High availability" (HA) is in our DNA and is a core goal across our products. As the world's fastest and most widely used software load balancer, HAProxy Enterprise builds on HAProxy's performance with HAProxy Enterprise WAF, HAProxy Enterprise Bot Management Module, Global Rate Limiting, and other advanced, multi-layered security features to help you get closer to 99.999% uptime.
Plus, functions like failover protection, retries, health checking, and traffic overload protection (request queueing) help you prevent disasters while boosting uptime. To learn more, check out our high availability page or our HAProxy Enterprise datasheet.
