Besides, we are not fully down. Some services are just degraded. Only 50% of the requests take 40 seconds to complete. Never mind the fact you'll never be able to load a complete page due to all the timeouts.

Also, I love how the Microsoft Azure SLA simply states that if they're down for "more than X hours in a month" then they will refund the cost of the service.

Not your lost profit!

Everyone assumes the latter -- that they'll be compensated -- but in reality they'll be refunded $3.27 for the storage account that's got a few gigabytes of ultra-critical build scripts and static web content, without which their multi-million dollar business stops dead.

"We can refund you with loose change, or a gift card for a coffee."

Isn’t that typical for basic retail services? You won’t get compensation for lost profit if the electricity goes out or your ISP quits routing your packets for a few hours. At least not with a standard service contract. You can negotiate something with real penalties if you’re big enough, but it won’t be cheap.

Yeah, I don't know anyone who assumes they'd be compensated for lost profit.

That would be something entirely different -- buying a form of insurance, basically, that would be expensive.

SLA's aren't meant to make your whole as a business, generally speaking. They're meant to incentivize the provider to take uptime really seriously, so that downtime eats some of their profit. Which means you can take their expected uptime estimates as a decent ballpark.

The Crowd Strike recompense

If you think that a $3.27 deal includes compensation for multi-million losses then your expectations of how businesses work need re-adjusting.

Does changing the indicator cost them really money?

Like are there contracts bound to the uptime and at the same time bound to them self reporting it? That would seem strange.