[AmericanChopper]

Telcos have historically had availability regulations in many places because of how people rely on them for access to emergency services. So they’re a special case here, and the amount of resources they invested into optimizing for that is beyond the capacity for most organizations.

10 years ago I was working for a company that provided a financial OLTP service. We had to invest a huge amount of money to be able to provide a reasonable HA architecture, and to be able to meet 4 hour DR SLAs, and we still had weekly maintenance outages. The amount of effort required to accomplish those service levels today is comparatively trivial, and you could reasonably expect even a low-budget one person operation to be able to exceed them.

You’d expect a service outage to be a significant public controversy today for a lot of companies. It’s never been a good thing, but we’ve come a long way from it being a completely routine event for most services. Especially given the explosion in online services.