Katkeilut

Katkeilut is a Finnish term used in technical and engineering contexts to describe interruptions or outages in the continuity of a service, signal, or process. The plural katkeilut refers to multiple instances of such interruptions and can vary in duration and impact. In telecommunications and data networks, katkeilut denote brief dropouts or pauses in a connection or stream, often caused by transient congestion, hardware faults, or routing changes. In broadcasting and audiovisual streaming, they describe short pauses or glitches that interrupt playback. In electrical power systems, katkeilut refer to temporary interruptions or voltage irregularities that disrupt equipment operation.

They are commonly characterized by their duration, frequency, and severity. Transient katkeilut are short (milliseconds to a few seconds) and may be mitigated by buffering or retransmission; sustained katkeilut last longer and can trigger failover or outages. The concept is used in service level agreements and reliability engineering to quantify user impact and to inform resilience design and monitoring.

Causes include network congestion, fiber cuts, hardware failures, software errors, power disturbances, or environmental factors. Mitigation approaches include redundancy (backup links, mirrored servers), buffering and adaptive streaming, error-correcting codes, retransmission protocols, and uninterruptible power supplies. In critical systems, automatic failover, watchdog timers, and diverse routing reduce the risk and impact of katkeilut.

Usage notes: while the term is common in Finnish discourse, it is often used alongside international terms such as outage, dropout, or interruption, depending on context. Understanding katkeilut supports planning for resilience and user experience improvements across networks and services.