palvelukatkoon

Palvelukatkoon is a Finnish term used in information technology to describe a period during which a digital service is unavailable to users. The word combines palvelu (service) and katko (interruption) and is used to categorize incidents in service management. It covers both intentional, scheduled maintenance and unintended disruptions.

There are two main types: suunnitellut katkot, which are planned outages during maintenance windows, and unplanned outages caused by faults, overloads, or external events. Common causes include hardware failures, software bugs, network outages, misconfigurations, capacity limits, and cyber incidents.

Impact depends on the service and the agreement with users. Outages reduce availability, affect user experience, and can have financial or reputational consequences. Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime within a given period, and the duration of the outage is tracked as MTTR (mean time to repair).

Management of service outages follows incident management practices: detection and alerting, triage, containment, resolution, and communication. Organizations maintain status pages, runbooks, and post-incident reviews. Mitigation strategies include redundancy, failover, load balancing, regular backups, out-of-band management, and defined maintenance windows to minimize disruption.

In Finnish IT literature, palvelukattoon is discussed alongside concepts such as SLAs, uptime, and incident management. It is used to frame planning, response, and communication around service disruptions.