What is a Reason for Outage (RFO)?

A Reason for Outage, or RFO, is the formal post-incident document a service provider sends to a customer explaining why a service was unavailable, how long it was down, what was done to restore it, and what will prevent recurrence. The term is standard in telecommunications, network carriers and managed service providers, where an RFO is usually a contractual deliverable tied to SLA credits. Functionally an RFO is a customer-facing RCA under a different name: it is written for an external reader, avoids internal detail, and is due on a clock. Enterprises consuming carrier or MSP services should expect an RFO for every credited outage.