I thought that sounded ridiculous so I did the math and 99.9999999 uptime allows for 1.314 _seconds_ of downtime every 1000 years. It would take approximately 2.7 million years to acquire just an hours worth of allowable downtime, that's how long it takes light from the second nearest spiral galaxy and farthest visible object to the eye in perfect conditions [1]. Within a single quarter of a year, that's 328.5 μs (microseconds) or about 1200 blinks of an eye [2] or about 3 times faster than a typical electric capacitor camera flash [3], also approximately, and interestingly enough, less than 1% of my current ping to my ISP let alone Amazon's servers.
So yeah, having done that I now understand that it was probably a joke but it really puts into perspective just how ridiculous things can get with a few 9's.
So yeah, having done that I now understand that it was probably a joke but it really puts into perspective just how ridiculous things can get with a few 9's.
[1] https://earthsky.org/clusters-nebulae-galaxies/triangulum-ga...
[2] https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-we-blink-our-eyes-3879...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_(photography) (wikipedia's won't let me deep link on my phone, it's in electronic flash section under types)