When HIVE goes up, new users come in, and that is great for the platform. But you know what is not great for the platform? Inactive witnesses!

Around 10% of the top 100 witnesses are inactive.

To illustrate the situation:

I am ranked #104 in the total witness rank.
I am ranked #90 in the active witnesses rank, so 14 witnesses above me are "dead"

But the issue goes deeper because not all witnesses are simply inactive, many of them are active but miss many blocks!

To illustrate it, I will use the weekly witnesses earning report compiled and published by @quochuy

This report is important because @quochuy compiled not only how much the witnesses make, but also how many blocks they miss!

In the earning report, I am ranked #87, which means 3 active witnesses above me did not produce more blocks than me, so they likely missed the difference! In the report, you can see in more detail who they are and how many blocks they have missed:
@quochuy/witness-earnings-weekly-report-2021-11-29

I can only speak for myself, I admit my server did miss one single block, but that was because I was tinkering with it at the wrong time! I am trying to run an instance of a front end for @creativecoin and I did an oopsie. I only get 3 blocks a day so I can tinker with my server for a few hours if I time it properly. If I grow as a witness of course I will have to rent a second server to develop and use one only to host the Hive node, but for now, I can contribute with development time and server space!

Continuing, as you can see from the report, it is now very profitable to run a witness node. A server can be as cheap as $40 USD a month, and basically, every witness on the top #100 makes that. When I started running mine I wasn't expecting to "be profitable" because HIVE was at around $0.20 USD, so it was not worth it financially.

So it is only logical that, now that it is financially justifiable to run a node, more people will try running a node, which is very welcome! But if they do it and give up shortly after, it is bad! Looks like that is the case for many "dead" witnesses!

In software development, there is a concept of "four nine availability", which refers to servers that are available 99.99% of the time.

9999

HIVE right now has very high availability, and the top 20 witnesses are very reliable. But HIVE mines in rounds with 21 witnesses, 20 from the top + 1 runner up. The runner-up is chosen "randomly" but respecting the ranks to give priority (simplified explanation), so the higher the rank the higher the chances to be chosen, and if the highest-ranked ones are not reliable it is bad for the blockchain!

It is your duty to keep an eye on the witnesses you vote for to contribute for us to keep a highly available and fast blockchain. If you are a witness make sure that your server is up to date and do not miss blocks, and everyone else, witness or not, needs to vote for the best ones and keep updating their votes.