Outages: understanding the human factor

Analyzing human error — with a view to preventing it — has always been challenging for data center operators. The cause of a failure can lie in how well a process was taught, how tired, well trained or resourced the staff are, or whether the equipment itself was unnecessarily difficult to operate.

There are also definitional questions: If a machine fails due to a software error at the factory, is that human error? In addition, human error can play a role in outages that are attributed to other causes. For these reasons, Uptime Institute tends to research human error in a different way to other causes — we view it as one causal factor in outages, and rarely a single or root cause. Using this methodology, Uptime estimates (based on 25 years of data) that human error plays some role in about two-thirds of all outages.