This is a potentially alarming finding from the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR): a combined 568 hours of downtime at 13 major cloud providers has cost £45.8 million (or $71.7 million) in business since 2007.

In the report, entitled “Downtime statistics of current cloud solutions”, IWGCR analysed the 13 providers, including Amazon, Microsoft and PayPal among others, and worked out that on average, cloud services were unavailable for 7.5 hours per year.

Turning it around, it means that cloud services are available 99.917% of the time – a comparatively huge difference from the oft-feted figure of 99.999% availability.

There has been plenty of scepticism concerning the supposed ‘five nines’ over the years, and this report may go some way to providing concrete evidence that 99.999% availability is a myth for now.

To put it into context, nPhaseOne notes that with ‘five nines …