PurposeThe purpose of this study is to develop Markovian model to obtain the transient probabilities to determine mean-time-to-failure and reliability function and further steady state availability of the repairable system. As the system parameters are uncontrollable factors; thus the life times, repair times and recovery/reboot time are assumed to be as uncertain or fuzzified distributions.Design/methodology/approachThe fuzzy approach is introduced to investigate the reliability measures of load sharing repairable system which consists of two operating units and one standby unit. On the failure of an operating component, it is instantly spotted, located and sent for recovery procedures with coverage probability. In case of imperfect recovery, reboot takes place.FindingsOn the basis of extension principle and mathematical programming approach, the authors establish membership functions for system characteristics with the help of α-cuts. To demonstrate the practical validity of the proposed fuzzified model, numerical illustrations are performed.Originality/valueThe model proposed for reliability analysis may cheer up the continuance of the work towards more applications in repairable systems. Therefore, the reader is provided with useful intuition into the nature of fuzzy computations and practical amendments while measuring ambiguous data.