About

Reason for Outage is written by Christy Steyn.

I started building data centers at 18, spent ten years in senior network escalation roles, then took a NOC operator seat at a Tier-1 global backbone on purpose, to get my hours back. I used those hours to retrain in AI systems and local inference, and then built the agentic RAG platform that NOC runs on today, as the only engineer, on self-hosted GPUs where no data leaves the building.

I write about what actually breaks when you put AI into real operations: retrieval, agents, inference infrastructure, and how to work with AI coding agents without losing engineering rigor. Everything here comes from a real decision, a real failure, or a real number. Nothing here names a customer, a device, or a colleague.

The tone rule: the failure log is the evidence, not the mood. Everybody starts somewhere. I'm starting with my mistakes.