THE COLLECTION / 001—012
A growing archive of technology’s most consequential failures. Follow the chain of events. Understand the weak points. Learn what changed.
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FIND THE FAILURE. FOLLOW THE LESSON.
12 sourced case files · 1996–2024Different incidents. Recurring weak points. Explore the connections across the collection.
A routine security update. A worldwide cascade of blue screens.
Open case file ↗Dormant code came back to life, and a trading system ran out of control.
Open case file ↗Two teams. Two unit systems. One spacecraft that never came home.
Open case file ↗A deleted production database revealed a much bigger recovery problem.
Open case file ↗A maintenance operation removed too much capacity—and exposed the services that depended on it.
Open case file ↗Redundancy could not protect a launcher from the same software flaw in both systems.
Open case file ↗A backbone outage also took away the tools needed to diagnose it.
Open case file ↗One expensive regular expression spread through a worldwide request-processing system.
Open case file ↗A brief network partition left database replicas with different versions of the truth.
Open case file ↗A customer change exposed a dormant bug in a shared delivery network.
Open case file ↗A leap-day calculation broke certificates. A hurried repair introduced another failure.
Open case file ↗Storage nodes trying to repair themselves exhausted the capacity they needed.
Open case file ↗Compare the cause, recovery, and safeguards in two or three case files.
Patterns and lessons are editorial interpretations. Each case links to a primary source.