Technology has always had an obsession with numbers, especially in the way that its marketed. This spawned the megapixel race, where camera manufacturers pointlessly one-upped each other by cramming more and more pixels into ever tinier sensors, selling you on more while giving you less.
The same story played itself out in the CPU frequency race of the early 2000's, with Intel and AMD pushing their chips to untenably high megahertz and gigahertz until AMD bowed out and attempted to change the message. It didn't work out so well for them. The obsession with marketing-driven numbers may well be justified.
It seems that even when it comes to services, this obsession still remains. Perhaps because nobody really knows what technology really does behind the scenes and numbers become the only way to quantify what something technical actually means for them. Tech Support is sold on something called 'Service Level Agreements', SLA in short. This conveniently allows marketing to attach yet another number, this time with increasingly insignificant decimal places tagged on behind. 99.9% up time guaranteed! We'll throw in another 0.09% if you pony up another couple of thousand!
What the numbers really don't tell you is that percentages rarely reflect satisfaction. If you had a service that really sucked, you would still hate it even if it were available to you 99.99% of the time. If I sold you a shitty mattress and told you it would stay on your bedframe nearly all the time, it wouldn't make sleeping in it any more comfortable. You can get a dial-up modem to stay online for months, even years at a time, but all you'd see on the internet would be boring old text (like you find here).
SLA is a binary issue. Its either up or its down. Being up is good, to be sure, but it really only reflects a part in the larger whole of user experience. Binary systems don't work well with the entire spectrum between excellent and terrible.
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