> It's the fault of the company that designed the automatic alarm. Not the hotel.

The hotel picked a monitoring solution which relies exclusively on email, or configured it like that. If anything they are absolutely both to blame but for different things. The company for designing a safety related system like this, the hotel for selecting an inadequate solution/configuration thus allowing their guests to be harmed.

> But it is accurate to say that the cause of the issue was the outage

The cause of the issue is the more immediate one - the configuration of the monitoring system. This avoids going up the causality chain to far - shitty coffee caused engineer to take down email system, and such.

Agreed, I'm not sure how it's acceptable to say "Email is exclusive option you can have" vs "We can email you when alarm is going off but light/siren will flash and it must be visible to those using the facility"

I feel like there are things we aren't being told here.. what kind of automatic chlorine dosing system both knows that there's too much chlorine and continues to add enough chlorine to the point of being harmful. Something is fishy here...

It would be accurate to call it the proximate cause.

Using the unqualified "cause" is misleading click bait and in some places it could get you sued

Isn’t the cause whatever sprung a leak in the first place? Ie a faulty pipe or valve?

Well somebody has to sign off the solution, in this case the hotel.

We can assign fault, or we can ask which levers we can pull to make it better:

1. Can there not just be a light / siren right next to the gas sensors? Easy to fix, but it requires hardware changes on-site.

2. Could Microsoft have not had an outage? Hard to fix.

3. Could they use some better notifications systems like idk self-hosted ntfy.sh with a warning if the server goes down? Yes but nobody wants to pay for that.