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Networking & Telecommunications vocabulary · Troubleshooting and Monitoring

Downtime

Meaning in networking & telecommunications, with examples

/ˈdaʊntaɪm/nounCore term

In networking & telecommunications, downtime means: The total time during which a system, link or service is not available, whether because of a fault or because of planned work.

In Turkish: kesinti süresi, hizmet dışı kalma süresi, duruş süresi

How it is used

Used in SLAs, reports and change planning. Teams try to minimise, avoid or schedule downtime; a change may need zero downtime or ten minutes of downtime. Its opposite is uptime, often given as a percentage such as 99.9%.

Example sentences

  1. The firmware upgrade will cause about 15 minutes of downtime on the branch routers.

  2. Last year's total downtime was only 40 minutes, well within our SLA.

Common collocations

  • planned downtime
  • unplanned downtime
  • minimise downtime
  • zero downtime
  • cause downtime
  • outageA period during which a network, a link or a service is not working or cannot be reached by its users.
  • SLAShort for service level agreement: the part of a contract in which a provider promises measurable service levels, such as uptime, repair time and latency, often with penalties if it fails.
  • maintenance windowAn agreed period, usually at night or at the weekend, when engineers are allowed to make changes that may interrupt service, such as software upgrades and hardware swaps.
  • redundancyHaving extra devices, links or power supplies in place so that the network keeps working if one of them fails.
  • go downTo stop working or become unreachable; used for links, servers, services and whole networks. The opposite is 'come back up' or 'be back up'.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Troubleshooting and Monitoring

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