Interruptionoutage

Interruptionoutage is a reliability concept describing events in which an interruption of a process coincides with an outage of a service, creating a period of halted operations and unavailability. It highlights the overlap between an internal disruption and the resulting user-facing downtime.

The term is informal and used in IT, telecommunications, and utility contexts to describe incidents that do not fit neatly into separate interruption or outage categories.

Common triggers include power loss or instability, network failure, equipment faults, software faults during recovery, maintenance overruns, weather, and human error. An internal disruption can trigger or amplify an external outage, and vice versa.

Impacts include downtime, data integrity risks, customer impact, and financial costs. Metrics cover duration of interrupted service, time to restoration, uptime percentage, and frequency. Some organizations track mean time to recover from interruptionoutage.

Approaches to mitigation include redundancy, failover, and proactive monitoring. Technical measures include uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators, diverse networks, and automated recovery. Organizational practices include incident response planning, disaster recovery testing, and change-management controls.

Examples occur in data centers where a power outage coincides with a server restart, and in telecom networks where a routing interruption during an outage disrupts multiple services.

Related terms include outage, interruption, service availability, reliability engineering, and incident management.