What uptime means
Uptime is the percentage of a measurement window during which a service is operating to its agreed specification. The complement is downtime: the percentage during which the service is unavailable or degraded below SLA thresholds. The measurement window is typically a calendar month in iGaming contracts, though some agreements use quarterly or annual windows for headline reporting.
Different parts of the stack carry different uptime expectations. Core platform services (login, wallet, game launch) typically commit to 99.9% or 99.95% uptime. Payment services target 99.9%. Game-content providers commit similarly. Some critical paths (live casino streams during peak events) carry stricter SLAs.
Uptime math and service credits
The maths is straightforward. 99.9% over 30 days allows about 43 minutes of downtime. 99.95% allows about 22 minutes. 99.99% allows about 4 minutes. The lower the allowed downtime, the more expensive the underlying infrastructure: redundant data centres, active-active failover, automated traffic shifting, and continuous health monitoring.
Most contracts include service-credit clauses that compensate the customer when the vendor misses its uptime commitment. Credits are typically capped at a percentage of monthly fees and rarely reflect the full commercial impact of downtime, particularly during peak events such as major sporting fixtures.
Why uptime matters in B2B
For operators, uptime is a baseline procurement criterion. Every minute of downtime during a sporting fixture or major casino promotion translates directly to lost GGR and customer complaints. For platform vendors, uptime targets drive infrastructure spend, on-call rotations, and incident-response staffing. Reputable vendors publish uptime trailing-30-day or trailing-90-day numbers in customer-success reviews.
For payment service providers, payment-leg uptime is the most visible KPI to operators, since failed deposits convert directly into lost first-time customers. Most modern contracts include severity-tiered SLAs that scale credits with outage duration. Gamblers Connect references uptime commitments and incident disclosures in operator and platform-vendor profiles where available.
Frequently asked questions about What Is Uptime in iGaming?
Over a 30-day month, 99.9% uptime allows about 43 minutes of downtime in total. That can be one extended outage or several short incidents. The contract usually defines how downtime is measured and what counts as service degradation.
Yes, but it requires active-active infrastructure, automated failover, and a mature on-call practice. The economics only make sense for high-volume platforms or critical-path components such as the wallet and payment layer.
It depends on the contract. Most agreements exclude pre-announced maintenance from the uptime calculation, subject to a maximum allowable maintenance budget. Unannounced or extended maintenance counts as downtime.
Most contracts cap credits at 10% to 25% of monthly fees, regardless of downtime severity. Operators typically have to negotiate any exposure-tied compensation separately during contract negotiation.