I think the parent was talking about being reliably on a specific ~50% of the time (and reliably off the rest of the time), not about outages a significant port

I think the parent was talking about being reliably on a specific ~50% of the time (and reliably off the rest of the time), not about outages a significant portion of the time when the customer would expect to use it. I'm not sure there are actually that many cases where that's great, but it's a different thing than what you're criticizing. Edited to add: Wonderfully, when trying to post this I got "Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly."