The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) Network Reliability Steering Committee (NRSC) recently completed a study of outages that use the new set of cause codes related to planned maintenance activity. The new cause codes were introduced to the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS) following a study of outages related to procedural issues. The objective of the study was to address the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) concern regarding what is described as an observed increase in the number of planned maintenance outage reports filed in NORS, based on the FCC's outage reporting thresholds.