What causes outages

11 root causes named in 415 of 5,994 incidents in the last 12 months · the rest gave no cause

11 causes

Cause	Incidents	Major	Median time
Capacity and loadTraffic, resource exhaustion or scaling limits overwhelmed the system.	82	25	1h 27m
Configuration changeA setting, policy, feature flag or config file pushed to production broke something.	79	34	1h 5m
Third-party dependencyAn upstream provider or another service the product relies on failed.	72	29	1h 54m
NetworkRouting, BGP, backbone, load balancer or connectivity faults.	53	16	1h 19m
DatabaseA database failover, overload, corruption or replication fault.	40	14	1h 17m
Deployment or rolloutA code release, migration or rollout that had to be rolled back.	34	16	1h 18m
Software bugA latent defect in the vendor’s own software surfaced.	18	6	21m
DNSName resolution failed or returned the wrong answer.	15	9	1h 30m
StorageObject, block or file storage became slow or unavailable.	12	3	2h 54m
Certificate or TLSAn expired, revoked or misissued certificate.	5	4	1h 21m
Power and facilitiesPower, cooling, fire or a data center facility problem.	5	4	26h 39m

Sources: vendors' own status pages, published postmortems and SEC 8-K Item 1.05 filings, read daily. Times as reported. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

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