Real outages, explained

Every Briefcase Study case is a real outage, played from the on-call seat before you know which company it was. These pages are the other half. Each one names the company and tells what happened in plain words, with a timeline in UTC, the call that ended it, exact quotes and links to the sources.

The facts come from the company's own postmortem and status page, read in full and checked a second time. When a source doesn't say something, the write-up lists it under what isn't known instead of guessing. A write-up goes up about a week after its case, so readers get to play it first.

These pages name the companies. To play an outage without knowing whose it was, start from every case so far.