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You are assuming that a minute of disruption can not cause more than a minute's loss of productivity. I don't think that assumption is justified.

Consider an exactly one minute outage that affects multiple things I use for work.

First, I may not immediately recognize that the outage is actually with some single service provider. If several things are out I'm probably going to suspect it is something on my end, or maybe with my ISP. I might spend several minutes thoroughly checking that possibility out, before noticing that whatever it was seems to have been resolved.

Second, even if I immediately recognize it for what it is and immediately notice when it ends it might take me several minutes to get back to where I was. Not everything is designed to automatically and transparently recover from disruptions, and so I might have had things in progress when the outage stuck that will need manual cleanup and restarting.



I'm also assuming most of the world doesn't grind to a halt when gmail is down. Crops keep growing and factories keep running.


Even software engineers who are in a state of flow keep working :)




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