Safety Instrumented Systems (SISs) are of prime importance in protecting people, assets and environment from hazardous events. Therefore, it is important to be able to assess accurately their performance indicators. For this end, IEC 61508 standard has provided two reliability metrics: the average failure probability of a SIS lowly demanded (PFDavg) and the average failure frequency of a SIS highly or continuously demanded (PFH). The aim of this paper is to investigate the IEC 61508 PFH formulas and to propose new ones based on the Markovian approach. Indeed, the new edition of IEC 61508 provides PFH formulas reflecting the possibility of automatic shutdown of the monitored process upon detection of a dangerous failure in the SIS. However, the IEC 61508 attempt remains incomplete and provide non-conservative results, which is dangerous from a safety point of view.