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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Outage

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈaʊtɪdʒ/nounCore term

In software engineering, outage means: A period when a service, system or part of it is not working or cannot be reached by users.

In Turkish: kesinti, hizmet kesintisi, erişim kesintisi

How it is used

Outages can be full or partial, planned or unplanned. You experience, cause, report and recover from an outage. Big provider outages often make the news and appear on public status pages.

Example sentences

  1. A partial outage in the storage service made image uploads fail for an hour.

  2. The outage started right after the config change, so we rolled it back.

Common collocations

  • partial outage
  • major outage
  • cause an outage
  • outage window
  • unplanned outage
  • downtimeThe amount of time a system or service is not available to users, either because of a failure or because of planned maintenance.
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • uptimeThe time or percentage of time that a system is working and available, often written as a figure such as 99.9 percent over a month or a year.
  • SLAShort for service level agreement: a contract that promises customers a certain level of service, such as 99.9 percent uptime, and says what happens if it is not met.
  • high availabilityDesigning a database system so that it keeps working with very little downtime, even if a server, disk or data center fails.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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