One Derecho Wrecks "Availability" Performance for the Whole Year

All it takes to degrade a 99.999 percent availability is a hurricane, derecho or other widespread weather or natural event. That "five nines" standard means annual outages of about five minutes, 26 seconds. 


Verizon says it continues to gain ground in restoring services to its wireline customers following the highly destructive June 29, 2012 Mid-Atlantic derecho that caused power outages to about three million homes and business locations, for at least some period of time. 


Verizon's wireline repair load currently is running two to three times normal levels. Many customers' voice, Internet and TV services are coming back as commercial power is restored, and Verizon crews are spread across the region to replace poles, re-hang downed lines and repair customers' services. As of July 5, 2012, field forces are responding to 156 downed utility poles and 897 downed copper or fiber cables in the region.

Uptime	Uptime	Maximum Downtime per Year
Six nines	99.9999%	31.5 seconds
Five nines	99.999%	5 minutes 35 seconds
Four nines	99.99%	52 minutes 33 seconds
Three nines	99.9%	8 hours 46 minutes
Two nines	99.0%	87 hours 36 minutes
One nine	90.0%	36 days 12 hours