The outage is the setting.
The reasoning is the story.

Postmortems often compress an investigation into a tidy answer. Root Cause keeps the difficult middle visible: initial assumptions, evidence sources, dead ends, turning points, recovery constraints, and the tests that changed the team’s mind.

Every public case is tied to an original incident report or vendor analysis and requires explicit editorial approval.

Editor

Root Cause is edited by Steve Thoms, a Microsoft 365 Product Lead with experience across enterprise IT, cloud services, and digital workplace systems.

Scope

Cases span cloud infrastructure, networking, AI platforms, distributed systems, and production operations. The publication teaches investigation patterns; it does not assign blame.