Updated: June 11, 2019
This SLA, applicable to the CenturyLink Network Exchange Service (“Service’) is provided pursuant to and in accordance with the governing service agreement between Customer and CenturyLink Communications, LLC and/or its affiliates (“CenturyLink”) and provides Customer's sole and exclusive remedies for any Service interruptions, deficiencies, or failures of any kind. The uptime obligations and any potential SLA credits are applied on a monthly basis unless specified otherwise.
Network Exchange Service: CenturyLink will deliver 99.99% uptime availability on Network Exchange for connections or Exchanges that have Endpoints inside the applicable data center that have physical, redundant cross-connects between CenturyLink’s pre-deployed infrastructure and the Endpoints. Examples of Endpoints include CenturyLink Cloud, CenturyLink Managed Hosting, and a Customer’s colocation environment. Network Exchange infrastructure is monitored within the CenturyLink network by CenturyLink monitoring systems. When Exchanges are active and properly configured, the Network Exchange service allows for the secure transmission of Customer network traffic between the Customer’s Endpoints inside the relevant data center. A Service failure occurs when a properly configured, active Exchange does not pass network traffic between the Customer’s Endpoints inside the relevant data center because of a problem with hardware/software that is within the control of Network Exchange. Only failures due to known CenturyLink problems in the CenturyLink provided hardware and/or software constitutes a failure for purposes of this SLA.
Availability SLA: Target availability for the Network Exchange Service is measured on a calendar month basis as follows:
Service | Availability |
Network Exchange Service | 99.99% |
Availability is calculated by dividing the number of minutes of unscheduled downtime in a calendar month by the total number of minutes in that calendar month.
Service | Availability | Availability Service Credit % of MRC for Affected Service |
Network Exchange Service | <100% to 99.99% <99.98% to 99.90% <99.89% to 95.00% <94.99 |
0% 5% 10% 15% |
User Interface: The Network Exchange User Interface (“UI”) is used for creating and managing Exchanges and access to the UI is available with secure login credentials via the CenturyLink Cloud Control portal or the Cloud Application Manager platform. Internet issues, or maintenance are examples of circumstances that may temporarily affect access to the UI. Access to the UI will not affect active Exchanges from securely passing the Customer’s network traffic between the Customer’s endpoints inside the data center. No availability SLA is provided for the UI.
Maintenance: At certain times, planned maintenance is required on CenturyLink’s Network Exchange infrastructure, including CenturyLink provided hardware and software. Network Exchange is designed for high availability and resiliency to avoid outages during maintenance and CenturyLink does not anticipate that maintenance will affect availability; however, maintenance services may affect and temporarily slow Network Exchange traffic and at times may disrupt availability. CenturyLink will provide at least 48-hour notice to Customers for potentially disruptive maintenance activity via email. Potentially disruptive activity includes maintenance where Network Exchange cannot transfer customer’s traffic between their endpoints within the data center. CenturyLink will provide at least 96-hour notice via email to Customers for disruptive maintenance activity that will cause a noticeable outage to Customers.
In addition, planned maintenance is required on the Network Exchange’s User Interface that can temporarily affect access to the User Interface.
Emergency Maintenance refers to any corrective action intended to remedy conditions likely to cause severe Service degradation or outages, as designated by CenturyLink in its sole discretion. Emergency Maintenance may include but is not limited to actions intended to address hardware or software failures or viruses/worms. CenturyLink will exercise reasonable efforts to inform Customer in advance before interrupting the Service for Emergency Maintenance, but such notice is not guaranteed and failure thereof does not constitute failure for purposes of this SLA.
Support: Support for Network Exchange is provided by the CenturyLink Global Operations Center and available 24x7x365. Customers can submit a support request via email to help@ctl.io. Additional information regarding Network Exchange and support is available in our knowledge base articles.
Incident Reports: CenturyLink will provide Customer with an Incident Report via e-mail within twenty-four (24) hours for incidents resulting in greater than thirty (30) minutes of downtime. The Incident Report will include: incident date, duration, issue, details of the problem and details of the resolution.
SLA Credit Claim: CenturyLink’s monitoring systems will log and report service failures. If Customer believes that a service failure occurred which is eligible for a service credit, Customer must open a support ticket through the Control portal or by email to help@ctl.io and request any credits by accurately detailing the credit request within 45 days of the failure in question. CenturyLink will issue to the Customer appropriate service credits for the failure as defined in this SLA upon review and confirmation of the service failure.
Exclusions: A service failure for purposes of this SLA shall not be deemed to have occurred if any of the following, by way of example and not limitation, occur or apply: actions of Customers or Customer’s authorized users which negatively impact the Service; a non-redundant cross-connect with Network Exchange; issues with network hardware/software that is outside the control of CenturyLink; network performance to Customer's physical location or Internet access point (such as a local DSL/cable modem); a Customer’s participation in malicious or aggressive activities that may cause failures, degradation, denial of service attacks or counter-attacks; issues with network hardware/software that are outside the control of Network Exchange (such as customer ordered cross-connects, customer provided equipment, and other CenturyLink provided equipment within the data center). Any customer activity noted above may result in a breach by Customer of other provisions by Customer, including the AUP. For example, actions such as making a firewall change or changing the routing table or issues with customer ordered cross-connects. Such actions will not constitute uptime failures and as such are not covered by this SLA. In addition, false or repetitive claims are also a violation of the Services Agreement and may be subject to service suspension.
Credit Limitations: