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From a consumers perspective, that makes sense. From a business's perspective, downtime can mean significant loss of revenue or new business opportunity.

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The costs of perfection are much, much greater. Are you willing to pay 2-3x the cost of everything to go from 99.999% to 100.0000000% uptime?

Probably the only thing in existence with 100.00% uptime are our nuclear missile command and control systems. Like, even my pen runs out of ink sometimes. It's just crazy how hard it is to have stuff work all the time.

I feel obligated to point out that basically no commercial service that relies on a big tech company has better than 99.99% uptime anymore. Your example isn't just hyperbolic, it avoid the actual problem. It isn't that "a bit more reliable" is "nontrivial less reliable than 5 years ago."

I wonder if consolidation actually makes this less of an issue for businesses?

If my website is down, but my competitors' isn't, I might lose business to them. If my competitor's website is also down, where are the customers gonna go?

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