Editorial standards
Reporting is only worth anything if a reader can check it. These are the rules we hold ourselves to, written down so you can hold us to them too.
Independence
Coverage decisions are made on news value alone and are never conditioned on a commercial relationship. No vendor, sponsor or advertiser sees a story before publication. We do not accept payment to publish, to withhold, or to alter a story, and sponsored material - if we ever run any - will be labelled as such in a way you cannot miss.
Where a story touches an organisation we have any commercial relationship with, that relationship is disclosed in the story itself. A disclosure that only appears once a reader goes looking for it is not a disclosure.
How stories are sourced
Every factual claim traces to a named source with a date, and those sources are listed at the foot of each report so you can check them yourself. Our primary material is public record: vendor status pages and release notes, regulator and standards-setter publications, filings, and court documents.
Where something is unconfirmed we say so, or we leave it out. We do not print a claim because it is probably true.
We report documented facts about vendor behaviour. We do not characterise a vendor's intent, competence or good faith, and criticism that appears here is sourced rather than editorial.
What we will not publish
Anything identifying a particular firm's incident. We do not publish an account of a named or identifiable organisation's outage, data loss or failed migration obtained privately rather than from the public record. Not anonymised, not with the identifying details filed off: a firm can recognise its own incident from the shape of a description alone.
Aggregate figures may appear where they are genuinely informative, but only over a cohort large enough that no individual organisation is identifiable, and never as a narrative about a particular case.
Repair instructions. This is a news desk, not a support site. We report what broke and what it means; we do not publish step-by-step fixes.
Corrections
We correct errors of fact promptly and visibly rather than quietly editing the page. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. See our corrections policy.
Independence in practice
The test of everything above is whether we are willing to report a failure that is inconvenient for someone we would rather keep on good terms with. We are. If you believe a story here has been shaped by anything other than the evidence, tell us, and say why.