Anatomy of a service outage: How did we get here?

Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.
As euphemisms go, it's hard to beat the term “service outage” as used by IT departments. While it sounds benign -- something stopped working but tech teams will soon restore order -- anyone familiar with the reality knows the term really means “Huge hit to bottom line.”
A quick perusal of the tech news will confirm this. Delta A