I'll agree with Mel that we need to start keeping track of these outages.
We have become very attuned to this issue because we have clients in the managed environment contacting us to find out what the problem is immediately, so we will often hear from multiple regions within minutes.
To keep our clients abreast of these outages, we now send out text alerts to Doctors'cells so that they know, and can adjust accordingly.
It is also important to understand where & what is breaking, as it appears to be multiple failure points.
Having built and/or operated complex multi-location networks that provided 2-5 9's reliability (99 to 99.999 percent) I know that networks can be built to be extremely resilient if it is a business priority.
This of course begs the question whether they have had an extraordinary run of massive failures, or someone in the food-chain doesn't share the same level of business priority.
I am also curious who is accountable - what does SureScripts or NewCrop do for AC (or the using Doctors) when they go down again? I know that service agreements often constrain damages to refunds for outages, and the ePrescribing service is part of the yearly fee, so there are some interesting questions that need answers.
