CCSP Cloud Concepts, Architecture, and Design Practice Question
A cloud customer is evaluating a provider's service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees 99.99% availability. What is the maximum allowable downtime per year (in minutes) before the SLA is violated?
⚠ Common exam trap
CCSP often tests the conversion between availability percentages and actual downtime, and candidates may confuse the number of nines (e.g., 99.9% vs 99.99%) or miscompute the minutes per year.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
52.56 minutes
An SLA of 99.99% availability allows 0.01% downtime per year. A year has 365 days × 24 hours × 60 minutes = 525,600 minutes. 0.01% of 525,600 is 52.56 minutes, so the maximum allowable downtime is 52.56 minutes per year. This is the correct calculation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
8.76 hours
Why it's wrong here
8.76 hours is the yearly downtime allowance for 99.9% availability (three nines), not 99.99%. It is tempting because 8.76 hours is a commonly memorised SLA figure. Four nines permits roughly 52.6 minutes annually, so this exceeds the allowance by a factor of ten.
- ✓
52.56 minutes
Why this is correct
A 99.99% availability guarantee permits 0.01% annual downtime. Applied to 525,600 minutes per year, that equals 52.56 minutes, the exact threshold the SLA specifies. Any outage exceeding this figure breaches the agreement, making it the maximum allowable downtime the stem requests.
- ✗
5.26 minutes
Why it's wrong here
5.26 minutes corresponds to 99.999% availability (five nines), not 99.99%. It is tempting because both figures sit in the same minutes-per-year range and look precise. The stem specifies four nines, so the permitted annual downtime is 52.6 minutes.
- ✗
87.6 hours
Why it's wrong here
87.6 hours is the annual downtime allowance for 99% availability (two nines), not 99.99%. It is tempting because it is the largest, most memorable figure in the standard SLA table. Four nines permits about 52.6 minutes per year, so this is roughly one hundred times too large.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every CCSP question from scratch — 934 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official ISC2 exam blueprint
This CCSP practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISC2 certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CCSP exam.