Perrow Cook Dekker theories explain cloud outages

The author argues that major cloud and IT outages, such as those involving CrowdStrike, AWS, and Microsoft, are predictable consequences of complex and tightly coupled systems rather than isolated anomalies. Drawing on the theories of Charles Perrow, Richard Cook, Sidney Dekker, and Dan Geer, the piece examines how normal organizational drift, tight coupling, and monocultures aggregate risk and complicate recovery. The analysis suggests that while outages cannot be entirely prevented, engineering teams can mitigate their impact by loosening coupling, limiting blast radii, and preserving buffers and experienced personnel. Open article →