Every major incident leaves behind a story. A cascading failure that took down half the internet. A single typo that cost millions. A security breach that changed how we think about trust.
These stories have been scattered across postmortems, blog posts, and conference talks. Until now.
We just launched our Famous Incidents collection: 100 of the most impactful software failures in recent history, analyzed and transformed into learning opportunities.
Why We Built This
The best incident responders share something in common: pattern recognition. They have seen enough failures that new problems feel familiar. Not identical, but rhyming. That database connection pool exhaustion looks a lot like the one that took down GitHub in 2018. That authentication cascade feels like the Azure outage from 2019.
But building this intuition traditionally requires years of on-call rotations and a fair amount of luck (or bad luck, depending on your perspective). You learn by being there when things break.
We wanted to change that.
What You Will Find
Our collection spans the full spectrum of production failures:
Cloud Infrastructure Outages. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and more. The S3 typo that broke the internet in 2017. The DynamoDB memory leak that cascaded across US-East-1. The Google authentication outage that locked out millions.
Security Breaches and Vulnerabilities. Heartbleed. Log4Shell. The Equifax breach that exposed 147 million people. The SolarWinds supply chain attack that compromised thousands of organizations.
Critical Software Bugs. Knight Capital losing $440 million in 45 minutes due to a deployment gone wrong. The Boeing 737 MAX MCAS flaw. The Bitcoin inflation bug that could have minted unlimited coins.
Database Disasters. GitLab accidentally deleting their production database. MongoDB instances exposed to the public internet. The Foursquare outage that taught an industry about sharding.
Network and DNS Failures. The Dyn DDoS attack that took down Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit simultaneously. Cloudflare’s regex that brought down their WAF globally. Facebook’s BGP misconfiguration that erased them from the internet.
Each incident includes a detailed breakdown: what happened, why it happened, and what teams learned from it.
Patterns Worth Recognizing
After analyzing 100 incidents, certain themes emerge repeatedly.
Cascading failures are the rule, not the exception. A single service degradation rarely stays contained. Retry storms amplify problems. Timeouts trigger more timeouts. Understanding these patterns helps you recognize when a small issue is about to become a big one.
Human error is almost always a symptom, not a cause. Behind every “someone typed the wrong command” is a system that made it too easy to do. The most resilient organizations focus on making safe actions easy and dangerous actions hard.
Monitoring gaps only become obvious during incidents. Every postmortem includes some version of “we did not have visibility into X.” Studying past incidents reveals what metrics and alerts actually matter before you learn the hard way.
Recovery often causes more damage than the initial failure. Rushed fixes, untested rollbacks, and configuration changes made under pressure. Some of the worst outages were caused by attempts to fix smaller problems.
How Teams Use This
For onboarding. New engineers can study how real incidents unfolded, building intuition without waiting for something to break. Understanding how the Kubernetes etcd memory corruption affected clusters teaches more than reading the documentation alone.
For game days. Use famous incidents as templates for your own drills. “What would we do if we experienced a DynamoDB-style cascade?” becomes a concrete exercise rather than abstract speculation.
For learning culture. Postmortems are great, but most teams only study their own incidents. Expanding your aperture to include industry-wide failures surfaces patterns you might never encounter otherwise.
For hiring. Ask candidates how they would approach debugging the GitHub Actions outage or the Cloudflare Cloudbleed leak. Their reasoning reveals more than algorithm puzzles ever could.
Start Exploring
We have made the entire collection freely browsable. Pick an incident type that matches your stack. Read about failures at companies similar to yours. Notice the patterns that repeat.
And when you are ready to go beyond reading, Incident Drill lets you practice handling these scenarios in realistic simulated environments. No production risk. Full observability. Real debugging.
Because knowing what happened is valuable. Knowing what to do when it happens to you is invaluable.
Explore the Famous Incidents collection and see what 100 production failures can teach you.