The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

As 2016 is coming to a close, we decided to look back on the past 4 years of data to see if we could find any interesting patterns in the ‘down’ events our customers experience.

Downtimes caused by timeouts have fallen each year from 85% of all ‘down’ events in 2012 to 67% this year while websites 500 errors are on the rise, nearly 80% year-over-year. I suspect it’s due to the increase use of CDNs like CloudFlare that are now kicking back 503s rather than the timeouts the source servers are showing.

Looking at our numbers, if your servers go down, there’s a slightly higher chance it will happen around 3:20 UTC on a Wednesday. Alerts will be most quiet around 16:45 UTC on Sundays.

From our data, a sysadmin’s worse day is around Nov 10 and the best is easily January 1.

So brace yourself for this Wednesday and hang in there… New Years is right around the corner.