Free Tool
SLA Uptime Calculator
Calculate allowed downtime for any SLA percentage, or convert actual downtime into an effective SLA. See how even brief DDoS outages impact your uptime guarantees.
SLA to Downtime
Downtime to SLA
DDoS Impact
A single 4-hour DDoS outage would put you below a 99.95% SLA target.
SLA Tiers Comparison
| SLA | Nines | Downtime / Year | Downtime / Month | Downtime / Week | Downtime / Day |
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How DDoS Attacks Threaten SLA Compliance
The average DDoS attack lasts 4-6 hours. A single 4-hour outage consumes your entire yearly downtime budget for a 99.95% SLA. Organizations with 99.99% ("four nines") SLAs have only 52.6 minutes of total allowed downtime per year -- a single undetected DDoS attack can blow through this budget in minutes.
Flowtriq detects attacks in 1 second, enabling immediate response and dramatically reducing the duration of DDoS-caused outages. Faster detection means less downtime, which means better SLA compliance.
Understanding SLA Uptime Percentages
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define the minimum uptime a service provider guarantees. The difference between 99.9% and 99.99% might seem trivial, but it represents a 10x reduction in allowed downtime: from 8 hours 46 minutes per year to just 52 minutes 36 seconds.
Each additional "nine" of availability requires exponentially more investment in redundancy, monitoring, and incident response. Most cloud providers offer 99.9% to 99.99% SLAs. Mission-critical financial systems and telecom services often require 99.999% ("five nines"), which allows only 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.
DDoS Attacks: The Biggest Threat to SLA Compliance
While hardware failures and software bugs cause downtime, DDoS attacks are uniquely dangerous because they are externally triggered, unpredictable, and can last for hours. A single unmitigated DDoS attack can consume an entire year's downtime budget. This makes real-time detection critical for any organization with SLA commitments.