# Tail Latency Status: Seedling Tail latency is latency at high percentiles, such as p95, p99, or p999. ## Mental Model Average latency tells you what usually happens. Tail latency tells you what your unlucky users experience. In production systems, rare slow paths matter because users often trigger many operations. The more operations involved in a request, the more likely one of them hits the tail. ## Why It Matters Tail latency affects: - User experience. - Timeout behavior. - Retry storms. - SLO compliance. - Capacity planning. ## Related - [[Field Notes/Backpressure]] - [[Field Notes/SLO]] - [[Topics/Production Engineering]]