Industry-wide research and academic studies consistently identify human error as a leading cause of data center outages. These errors can range from incorrect equipment configuration and flawed maintenance procedures to simple operational mistakes. According to the Uptime Institute's annual outage analyses, human error consistently accounts for a significant percentage of downtime incidents. The increasing complexity of data center infrastructure, including power, cooling, and IT systems, creates more opportunities for mistakes that can have cascading and severe consequences, leading to service unavailability.

B. False: This is incorrect. Overwhelming empirical data from decades of data center operations analysis confirms that human error is a primary, not a minor, contributor to downtime events.

1. Uptime Institute. (2022). 2022 Annual Outage Analysis. In the section "The causes of outages: Still mostly human error and management-related," the report states, "The biggest single cause of outages is, once again, human error and management-related issues... In the past three years, 70% of all outages have been attributed by their owners to these causes." This directly supports that human error is a major cause.

2. Avizienis, A., Laprie, J. C., Randell, B., & Landwehr, C. (2004). Basic Concepts and Taxonomy of Dependable and Secure Computing. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 1(1), 11–33. https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2004.2. This foundational academic paper on system reliability classifies faults, errors, and failures, identifying "human-made" faults (both accidental and intentional) as a primary fault class affecting system dependability, which is directly applicable to data center operations.

3. Patterson, D. A., & Hennessy, J. L. (2017). Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface. Morgan Kaufmann. In Chapter 6, "Parallel Processors from Client to Cloud," the section on dependability (6.8) discusses sources of system failures, noting that operator error is a significant contributor to system downtime, reinforcing the concept's validity in computer science and engineering curricula.