Outage

How it is used

Used in operations, customer communication and incident reports. Outages are planned or unplanned, partial or total; they are reported, investigated and resolved. Operators publish outage notices, and engineers write a report after a major outage. An outage is the event; downtime is how long the service was unavailable.

Example sentences

1. The outage affected about 3,000 customers in the eastern districts for two hours.

2. We have a planned outage on Sunday night to replace the core switch.

Common collocations

• planned outage
• network outage
• major outage
• power outage
• outage report

Related terms

• downtimeThe total time during which a system, link or service is not available, whether because of a fault or because of planned work.
• 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'.
• 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.
• NOCShort for network operations centre: the team and room, often staffed 24/7, that monitors a network, responds to alarms and coordinates the repair of faults and outages.
• 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.

This word in other fields

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

• outage · Software Engineering
• outage · Cloud Computing & DevOps

More terms: Troubleshooting and Monitoring

• ping
• troubleshoot
• traceroute
• packet capture
• SNMP
• network monitoring