The terms “website downtime” and “server downtime” seem to be used interchangeably for some people, but the fact of the matter is that these two issues are actually very different in nature. Website downtime happens when a website goes down, whether it be due to hackers, traffic overload, software failure, etc. Server downtime, on the other hand, happens when the server that a site is hosted on goes down, due to things like power or hardware failures.