Root cause analysis refers to identifying the underlying factors that lead to abnormal failures in complex systems. Causal-based backward reasoning methods, founded on structural causal models, are among the optimal approaches for implementing root cause analysis. Most current causality-driven root cause analysis methods require the prior discovery of the causal structure from data as a prerequisite, making the effectiveness of the analysis heavily dependent on the success of this causal discovery task. Recently, score function-based intervention identification has gained significant attention. By comparing the variance of score function derivatives before and after interventions, this approach detects the set of intervened variables, showing potential to overcome the constraints of causal discovery in root cause analysis. However, mainstream score function-based intervention identification is often limited by the score function estimation step. The analytical solutions used in existing methods struggle to effectively model the real distribution of high-dimensional complex data. In light of recent advances in data generation, this study proposes a diffusion model-guided root cause analysis strategy. Specifically, the proposed method first estimates the score functions corresponding to data distributions before and after the anomaly using diffusion models. It then identifies the set of root cause variables by observing the variance of the first-order derivatives of the overall score function after weighted fusion. Furthermore, to solve the issue of computational overhead raised by the pruning operation, an acceleration strategy is proposed to estimate the score function from the initially trained diffusion model, avoiding the re-training cost of the diffusion model after each pruning operation. Experimental results on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method accurately identifies the set of root cause variables. Furthermore, ablation studies show that the guidance provided by the diffusion model is critical to the improved performance.