Enter your circuit SLA type and outage start time to get a live countdown to breach, real-time penalty exposure, and current status. Updates every second.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) breach occurs when a circuit outage exceeds the maximum allowable downtime defined in the service contract. For telecom carriers, the most common SLA metric is Mean Time to Restore (MTTR) — the maximum time allowed to restore service after a reported outage.
When MTTR is exceeded, the carrier owes the customer a financial credit or penalty, typically expressed as a fraction of the Monthly Recurring Charge (MRC). Breaches can trigger automatic credits, dispute resolution processes, and in some cases, contract termination rights.
| SLA Type | MTTR Allowance | Typical Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| 99.9% availability | 8.76 hrs/year | Standard enterprise |
| 99.99% availability | 52.6 min/year | Critical enterprise |
| 99.999% availability | 5.26 min/year | Carrier-grade |
| 4-hour MTTR | 4 hours per incident | Carrier Ethernet MEF |
SLA penalties in telecom contracts are most commonly structured as service credits — reductions in the next invoice rather than cash payments. Common structures include:
Most enterprise SLAs cap total credits at one month's MRC per incident. Credits typically must be requested by the customer within 30–90 days of the incident.
This calculator uses conservative single-tier formulas. Always refer to the actual contract language for precise penalty calculations.
A 99.99% availability SLA allows 52.6 minutes of downtime per year (0.01% of 525,600 minutes in a year). That sounds generous until you see how fast a single incident consumes it.
Say an outage starts at 2:00 PM and isn't resolved until 3:15 PM — 75 minutes. That single incident already exceeds the entire year's 52.6-minute allowance by more than 20 minutes, and the SLA is breached for the rest of the calendar year the moment it happens (there's no more downtime budget left, regardless of how reliable the circuit is afterward). At a $2,000 MRC circuit using the "1 day credit per day of outage" structure, the customer is owed 1/30 of $2,000 ≈ $66.67 per day the SLA stays breached-for-the-year in dispute, though most contracts cap this at one month's MRC per incident rather than compounding for the rest of the year.
The practical lesson: for a 99.99%-or-tighter SLA, the relevant question during an active outage usually isn't "will we breach" — a single bad incident already answers that — it's "how much worse does this get per additional minute," which is exactly what the live countdown and penalty exposure above are tracking.
Does the SLA "reset" after a breach, or does every future outage this year also breach?
Depends on the contract, but most availability SLAs (99.9%/99.99%/99.999%) measure downtime cumulatively over a rolling or calendar year — once the year's allowance is used up, yes, every subsequent outage that year is also technically a breach of the annual availability target, even a short one. A 4-hour MTTR SLA is different: it resets per-incident, since it's measuring restoration time for each individual event rather than cumulative annual downtime.
Is the penalty always based on the full outage duration, or just the time past the MTTR threshold?
This varies by contract. Some SLAs (especially 4-hour MTTR types) only start accruing penalty once you've exceeded the threshold — the first 4 hours are "free" in penalty terms even though the customer was still down. This calculator's day-credit and hourly structures follow that convention: the countdown and exposure only activate after the MTTR clock actually reaches zero.
Why is 4-hour MTTR listed separately from the percentage-based SLAs?
Percentage SLAs (99.9%, 99.99%, 99.999%) cap total annual downtime and don't care how it's distributed across incidents. A 4-hour MTTR SLA instead caps how long any single incident is allowed to run, uncapped on how many incidents happen per year — common in Carrier Ethernet/MEF contracts where a per-event restoration commitment matters more than an annual aggregate.