Skip to content
Wednesday, 4 November 2026Independent briefs on business, markets and technology
Notes and analysis on the modern tech stack
Insights

What a Year of Outage Post-Mortems Shows

We read a year of public incident write-ups. The most common causes were not the ones the headlines focused on.

New Stack Notes We read a year of public incident write-ups. The most common causes were not the ones the headlines…
New Stack Notes: Diploma de Seguridad Informática
Photo: Carlos Reusser Monsálvez — CC0 - Carlos Reusser Monsálvez

We read a year of public incident write-ups. The most common causes were not the ones the headlines focused on.

The detail behind this is what separates a development worth tracking from a headline that passes. Underlying figures point in a consistent direction, and the parties involved have given enough detail to establish the scale of the change rather than just its direction.

What follows is the part that requires reading rather than skimming: the context that makes the numbers interpretable, the constraints that will decide whether the change sticks, and the signals worth watching over the coming weeks. Where estimates are involved they are marked as such, because the gap between an estimate and an outcome is where most of the risk sits.

Coverage continues at New Stack Notes, where this story sits in the insights stream alongside related reporting, with sources attributed and the underlying figures set out in full so readers can check the reasoning themselves.