What does ESP8266 rst cause: 2 mean?

Sometimes you will see a message like

 ets Jan  8 2013,rst cause:2, boot mode:(3,6)

load 0x4010f000, len 3460, room 16 
tail 4
chksum 0xcc
load 0x3fff20b8, len 40, room 4 
tail 4
chksum 0xc9
csum 0xc9
v0007e100
~ld
7

on the ESP8266 serial line.

rst cause: 2 means that the ESP was restarted from the firmware using

ESP.restart();

Typically such a restart is intentional. Look for ESP.restart() calls in your firmware. It’s not straightforward to identify which ESP.restart() call caused the reset. I recommend to insert Serial.println() statements describing the reset cause before every call to ESP.restart(), for example:

Serial.println("Resetting due to Wifi not connecting...");
ESP.restart();