Defining service availability using the famous X nines (and all the hacks like “planned downtime doesn’t count”) is pretty useless in a highly distributed system where the only thing that really matters is the user experience, not ping response times. One should ask what precisely should we be measuring, and how could we make sure we can act on the measurements

More details in a concise analysis of the Meaningful Availability paper by the one-and-only The Morning Paper.