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When someone (truthfully) says “99.9 percent of the time,” it’s often all right to round up to one hundred.  When examining Google’s downtime, though, there’s a lot to be learned by looking at numbers even farther beyond the decimal point.

Way out at the thousandths place - where differences of just 0.001 are measured - is where Pingdom, “The Uptime Company,” found some interesting differences.  Actually, Pingdom took even more precise measurements, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll stay within those limits.

In any event, out of Google’s search sites in 32 different countries, “The website with the least downtime was the Brazilian Google Search (www.google.com.br) which was only unavailable for a total of 3 minutes,” according to “The Uptime Company.”

That’s three minutes over the course of a year, by the way, which is damn impressive.  But even Google’s worst performer didn’t do at all poorly.  “The website with the most downtime was the Swedish Google Search (www.google.se) which was unavailable a total of 48 minutes,” the Pingdom report states.

This corresponds to a failure rate of 0.001 percent for Brazil and 0.009 percent for Sweden, in case you’re wondering.  The United States fell in between with downtime measured at 0.006 percent and 31 minutes.

As Pingdom points out, this means “Google Search users in the United States are 10 times more likely to encounter a problem than users in Brazil.”  But as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld responded, “I think I can live with that.”