What constitutes as an outage?

[jdinh]

What is the industry standards in terms of % of degradation, before service is deemed an outage? 

[Sandeep Rajput]

@jdinh 

Most organizations use a severity or impact matrix (like Sev 1, 2, 3…) to define what constitutes an outage vs degradation:

• Sev 1 / Outage: Complete unavailability or >50% functionality loss (e.g., more than half the users can't access, or response time is beyond acceptable SLA).

• Sev 2 / Major degradation: 25–50% degradation in performance or partial service unavailability.

• Sev 3 / Minor degradation: <25% degradation or slowness impacting some users or non-core functions.

[clarksal]

Are you talking about outage in terms of Incident response/management?  Or outage in terms of change request, i.e. a device or service has to be restarted or rebooted for the change to take effect.  

In my former organization, if something was not working as intended or advertised, it was considered an outage.  But we tied impact to that.  I.e. A server goes down in the middle of the night due to a power outage, but there are no users/customers using it because it's after hours, that would still be an outage, but have zero impact.  

When creating a change, if a server had to be rebooted to install a patch, but it was happening after hours or duing the server's maintenance window, it was still considered an outage, but no impact because it was scheduled after hours or during a defined/documented maintenance window.  

Hope that helps.