"One in ten outages is now AI": that figure measures something else
The 10.7% going round this week comes from a serious report — 109,000 status-page incidents, 390 companies, 2018 to 2026 — but it does not say AI causes one outage in ten: it says one published outage in ten was published by an AI company. The same report holds another number that does change a decision: a cascade triggered by a third party takes a median of 247 minutes to resolve, against 96 for an internal configuration failure. Two and a half times, because the fix is not in your hands. We go through what each figure in this week's three studies actually measures, why the 61% of failures that passed internal testing is not an AI problem but a staging one, and the switch-off test.