What This Is
Failure analysis is the discipline of determining why things broke. In practice it means working backward from damaged evidence — a charred circuit board, a fractured component, a pattern of field returns — to reconstruct the sequence of events that led to a failure. The goal is a root cause: the condition or action, if corrected, that would have prevented the outcome.
That is the technical description. The fuller description includes everything that happens around the investigation: the organizational pressure to reach a particular conclusion, the supplier relationships that make certain findings inconvenient, the legal considerations that shape how a result is communicated, the human situations that complicate what would otherwise be a straightforward engineering judgment.
This site exists because those things are worth writing about and rarely are. The technical literature covers methods. The case studies in journals cover findings. What they do not cover is the room — who was in it, what they wanted, and what it cost to say what the evidence actually showed.
The cases here are real. The details have been changed to protect the individuals and organizations involved. The findings, the methods, and the dynamics are not changed. They are the point.