Five Whys Output 1

• State the problem. A production server outage occurred during peak business hours.

• Why 1? Because the server ran out of memory and the production service became unavailable.

• Why 2? Because a recent deployment likely caused the application to consume more memory than expected.

• Why 3? Because the deployment appears to have introduced a defect or configuration change that was not detected before release.

• Why 4? Because deployment validation and operational safeguards were insufficient to catch the issue early.

• Why 5? Because incident preparation and release discipline were not strong enough to prevent or quickly recover from a bad production change.