When that downtime happens is way more important than the amount of it. Imagine if your payroll system was down for 8 hours a month, but it just so happened to be the day payroll do their calculations?
Totally. The uptime metrics are deceiving imo. A more useful measure for a productivity tool like Claude Code is uptime during work hours for a given time zone. I strongly suspect at least for the three US time zones, we would be looking at a single nine of uptime for that measure.
Business/Office productivity tools can be productive at that rate. Core systems like ERP or arguably CRM can't, but MS Teams is probably already that low, Figma, Canva and several others could absolutely afford to be one nine before it affects their churn materially. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic make most of their profit on business use cases rather than dev use cases (likely higher revenue but less profit) so this may be what sets the standard of uptime.
Works out at even more days when you consider working hours. And these downtime events never happen when I'm sleeping, always smack in the middle of the afternoon when I'm working.