I remember a discussion on a FreeBSD mailing list, around 2003-2004, where people bragged about the impressive (though in comparison to this headline, puny) uptimes of a few years.
One of the developers remarked that while he was proud the system he worked on could deliver such uptimes, having an uptime of, say, three years, on a server, also meant that a) its hardware was kind of dated and b) it had not received kernel updates (and probably no other updates, either) for as long. (Which might be okay, if your system is well tucked away behind a good firewall, but is kind of insane if it is directly reachable from the Internet.)
One of the developers remarked that while he was proud the system he worked on could deliver such uptimes, having an uptime of, say, three years, on a server, also meant that a) its hardware was kind of dated and b) it had not received kernel updates (and probably no other updates, either) for as long. (Which might be okay, if your system is well tucked away behind a good firewall, but is kind of insane if it is directly reachable from the Internet.)
Still, that is really impressive.