Last updated: 2026-07-19
What Is Downtime?
Definition
Downtime is any period when a website, server, or service is unavailable or not functioning correctly. There are two types: unplanned downtime (crashes, network failures, DDoS attacks) and planned downtime (maintenance windows, deployments, upgrades). Both count against your uptime percentage.
Why it matters
Downtime costs money. A widely cited Gartner study estimates the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 per minute (source: Gartner, 2014). For a SaaS company charging $100/mo per customer with 1,000 customers, one hour of downtime during business hours could mean dozens of support tickets, churn risk, and reputational damage that takes months to repair.
Example
A team deployed a change on Friday at 5 PM without monitoring. A misconfiguration caused their API to return 500 errors. No one noticed until Monday morning when customer complaints flooded in. 62 hours of downtime. With PingWatchdog alerting, they would have known within 30 seconds.
How PingWatchdog helps
PingWatchdog detects downtime in 30 seconds or less and sends instant alerts to your team via Slack, email, PagerDuty, or any channel you configure. Auto-created incidents track the timeline and help your team respond faster. When the service recovers, PingWatchdog confirms it and auto-resolves the incident.