A policy's stance on non-malicious human error committed during a maintenance or operations task, the most frequent cause of major data center outages.
Human operational error treatment refers to how an insurance policy responds to a non-malicious mistake made by an operator, technician or engineer during a routine maintenance or operations task, statistically the most frequent cause of major data center and cloud outages, well ahead of pure hardware failures or natural disasters. Unlike an act of sabotage or clear-cut gross negligence, an ordinary human error, a mistargeted command, a poorly followed procedure, a test mistakenly run in production, generally falls within the normal hazard of complex human activity and remains covered under standard property and business interruption policies, with no specific exclusion. The difficulty for the insurer is less legal than technical: establishing that an outage resulted from human error rather than an underlying hardware defect the error merely exposed often requires deep forensic investigation, in a field where technical logs can be incomplete or themselves affected by the incident. This peril also highlights, for the insured, the value of demonstrating the quality of its change-management procedures and of test environments isolated from production, points increasingly scrutinized at underwriting.
The engineer behind Amazon Web Services' February 2017 S3 outage had run a routine maintenance command with an overly broad parameter, mistakenly removing more servers than intended, a textbook case of ordinary human error rather than hardware failure or malicious intent.
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