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CrazyStat 2 hours ago

Perhaps an easier to intuit version of it is how full airliners are.

An airline might report that their flights are on average 60% full, and that might be completely absolutely 100% true. But that's not what passengers experience. If we assume (for convenience) that a plane holds 100 people, when the plane is 20% full then 20 passengers experience that, but when the plane is 100% full then 100 passengers experience that. On average, from a passenger's point of view, the flights are much more than 60% full--it might be 70 or 80%--because a full flight is experienced by more passengers than an empty flight.

For a concrete example imagine two flights, one 20% full and one 100% full: the average is 60% from the airline's point of view, but 100 passengers experienced a full flight and only 20 experienced the 20% full flight, so from the passenger's point of view the average is 86.7% full.

The same logic applies to outages. If you have an outage that lasts one minute then only a few users will encounter it. If you have an outage that lasts one hour then many more users will encounter that. The longer the outage is, the more likely any given user is to encounter it, so from the user's point of view the "average" outage is much longer than the "true" average where you weight every outage equally.

Again we can consider a concrete example: imagine you run a website that gets 100 visitors per minute. You have one outage that lasts 1 minute, then later a second outage that lasts 9 minutes. Your average outage time is 5 minutes. But 100 visitors experienced the 1 minute outage, while 900 visitors experienced the 9 minute outage, so from the point of view of a visitor the average outage is (900*9 + 100*1)/1000 = 8.2 minutes.