A downtime threshold below which no indemnity is due under contingent business interruption cover, often eight to twelve hours.
The waiting period is a deductible expressed in time, below which a service interruption gives rise to no indemnity. Most often set between eight and twelve hours by market convention, with no actuarial study of the distribution of outage durations, it becomes the most decisive variable in catastrophic cyber exposure. For the density of downtime durations concentrates between a few hours and a day, exactly where the threshold sits, so moving it by four hours changes the loss not by 20% but by an order of magnitude. The insured loss of a hyperscaler outage is therefore set not by the event but by this clause.
A cloud outage of fifteen to sixteen hours against a waiting period of eight to twelve produced insured-loss estimates from 38 to 581 million dollars, a factor of fifteen.
période d'attente, time deductible, waiting period, période de carence cyber