# Stop reporting uptime as percentages

> Uptime percentages are meaningless to most people. Show actual downtime instead.
- Title: Stop reporting uptime as percentages · Jim Nielsen | Shortify
- Summary: Uptime percentages are meaningless to most people. Show actual downtime instead. Uptime percentages near 100% are logarithmic, not linear. A status page…
- Keywords: uptime metrics, status pages, infrastructure reliability, service reliability, user communication, github, ci/cd, slack, downtime, reliability engineering, metrics design, technology
- Source: Jim Nielsen — https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/stop-with-the-uptime-percentage
- Author: Jim Nielsen
- Published: 2026-09-03T19:00:00+00:00
- Read time: 1 min
- Topics: uptime metrics, status pages, infrastructure reliability, service reliability, user communication, github, ci/cd, slack, downtime, reliability engineering, metrics design, technology
## Uptime percentages are deceptive
99.9% and 99.99% look similar but the latter is 10 times more reliable. The difference is nonlinear, like earthquake magnitude scales.

> The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude.
## Infrastructure pros speak in nines
Engineers use shorthand like two nines, three nines, four nines because they work with these numbers daily and understand the exponential jumps.
## Status pages now reach everyone
Service status pages used to be for infrastructure teams only. Now regular users check them when GitHub, Slack, or CI systems go down.
## Percentages fail as public interfaces
Uptime percentages are good metrics for standardized measurement but terrible for communicating reliability to people who just want to know if a service is broken.

> I just want to know, "Dude, how much have you been down lately? Seems like a lot…"
## Show hours of downtime instead
Replace "98.31% uptime" with "12 hours affected in the last 30 days (98.31% uptime)." One requires math literacy, the other just requires knowing what an hour is.
## Key takeaway

Uptime percentages near 100% are logarithmic, not linear. A status page should tell you how many hours of downtime occurred, not a confusing percentage.