Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
the deploy triggered it, and the missing alert, the stale runbook and the one-person rotation all had to be true as well.
Contributing factor
One of several conditions that had to hold for a failure to happen or to last as long as it did. It is the replacement for root cause in most modern incident practice, because a list of factors gives you a list of places to intervene rather than one thing to blame. It also matches how the failure actually felt to the people in it, which is what makes the review honest.