Hooray for outages! (Score 1)

I highly doubt they will ever say who is officially to blame, but most likely it was a combination of pressure from 'above' for the developers to complete the upgrade by xxxxx, for the roll-out team to implement & verify the upgrade globally with absolutely no downtime, the lack of time to test the application for every possible bug or 'feature' that may arise (including going through the code step-by-step to make sure no weird situations or invalid data input/output could occur) and the sheer complexity of the system(s). Some level of management are definately to blame for the outage. At least one person is going to loose their job or get a severe telling off over this.

As for the non-critical upgrade statement, if it was non-critical how come it caused a major outage, and in the case of where I work, caused a reasonably significant loss via disruption of communications? I'd classify that as more than non-critical, but I'm funny that way...