This page may contain stale information. Last updated: 2026-06-12

Definition

Service availability refers to the percentage of time a service is operational and accessible to users. Measured in “nines” (99%, 99.9%, 99.99% etc.).

Key Points

  • SLA (Service Level Agreement) targets
  • Causes of downtime (maintenance, failures, incidents)
  • High-availability architecture patterns
  • Monitoring and alerting
  • Model retirement: API requests to retired AI models fail immediately — zero availability after cutoff (2026-06-12-anthropic-claude-api-june-15-deprecation)

Sources