Methods and systems are described for predicting the likely causes of
service outages using only time information, and for predicting and the
likely costs of service outages. The likely causes are found by defining
a narrow likely cause window around an outage based on service quality
and/or service usage data, and correlating service events to the likely
cause window in the time domain to find a probability distribution for
the events. The likely costs are found by measuring usage loss and
duration for a given point during an outage and using cost component
functions of the time and usage to extrapolate over the outage. These
cause and cost predictions supply service administrators with tools for
making more informed decisions about allocation of resources in
preventing and correcting service outages.