1977 → 2025 · a historical atlas
Timeline
Every analyzed incident, chronologically. The shape of a century of failure. Newer incidents accumulate at the top.
2025
- Oct 20The day a single DNS record took down half the internetSEV1AWS DynamoDB race condition cascades across us-east-1 for 15h 23m.
2024
- Jul 19How CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows machines in 78 minutesSEV1A Falcon sensor channel-file update dereferenced an uninitialized pointer inside the Windows kernel.
- Jun 06Boeing Starliner and the nine failed thrustersSEV2Thermal shielding design assumed shorter burns than ISS rendezvous required.
- Mar 29Four years to plant a backdoor: the xz-utils operationSEV1Patient social engineering placed malicious code in a core compression library used by SSH.
2023
- Dec 26The Baltic cable severance and ambiguous attributionSEV2Two undersea cables cut within 22 hours; investigators could not distinguish sabotage from anchor drag.
- Mar 10SVB: when liabilities moved faster than assetsSEV1Interest-rate risk was managed assuming retail-paced deposit outflows; deposits left at Slack speed.
2022
- Jul 08Rogers coast-to-coast: when OSPF meets a typoSEV1A maintenance-window policy change withdrew routes nationwide; 911 services went down with it.
2021
- Oct 04Facebook withdraws itself from the internetSEV1A BGP withdrawal from a routine audit command removed the DNS servers that served the auth tokens.
2020
- Aug 30CenturyLink and the Level 3 flowspec amplifierSEV1A flowspec rule intended to block one customer propagated, matching traffic across the entire backbone.
2012
- Aug 01Twenty-three lines of YAML and a half-billion-dollar morningSEV1A retired flag was reused for new logic; one of eight deployment servers still had the old code.
2011
- Mar 11Fukushima: the tsunami height assumption that did not holdSEV1Seawall design anchored on a historical record shorter than the geological record of the region.
2010
- May 06The Flash Crash and the algorithm that could not stopSEV1A large futures order triggered a chain of HFT liquidity withdrawals; the market lost 9% in minutes.
1987
- Jun 03Therac-25 revisited: the race condition that killedSEV1A hardware interlock was removed and replaced with software that had a race condition in setup mode.
1977
- Mar 27Tenerife: the runway, the fog, and the authority gradientSEV1Two 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos. The crew was senior; the first officer hesitated to correct.