Latency vs Uptime: What Customers Actually Feel
Treat latency as part of uptime so customers see consistent speed.
By Jordan LeeProduct Manager•Published November 15, 2025•5 min read
Redefine availability
Count requests slower than your SLO threshold as partial downtime.
Track by endpoint so you know which teams to page.
Tune alerts
Trigger alerts on latency percentiles and error rate together to avoid false positives.
Use dependency dashboards to spot which service is slow.
Key metrics
- p95 latency
- Saturation
- Error percentage
Communicate impact
Mention latency in status updates so customers understand degraded states.
Tie latency regressions to burn rate to drive urgency.
Slow is down when users abandon sessions.
Article stats
- Author: Jordan Lee
- Role: Product Manager
- Published: November 15, 2025
- Reading time: 5 min
Tags
#latency#uptime#api performance
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