// FAILURE INTELLIGENCE FEED
The newspaper of record for things that went very wrong.
On May 30, 1626, something ignited the imperial gunpowder arsenal in the heart of Beijing, flattening two to four square kilometres of the capital, killing up to 20,000 people, and triggering a succession crisis that contributed to the fall of the Ming dynasty. The cause has…
In 537 AD, Emperor Justinian I completed the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in just five years — the largest domed structure in the world, built by…
In July 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder landed successfully and deployed the Sojourner rover — the first wheeled vehicle on another planet. Within days,…
On 26 September 1983, the Soviet Oko satellite early warning system reported five US intercontinental ballistic missiles inbound from Montana. The…
In 1992, EDP — the Portuguese state electricity company — began construction of a 110-metre hydroelectric dam on the Côa river in northeastern…
In 1588, Philip II of Spain launched the most expensive naval expedition of the 16th century to invade Protestant England. The fleet of 130 ships…
From 2016 to 2019, the Australian Department of Human Services operated the Online Compliance Intervention system — universally known as Robodebt —…
On 25 October 2021, Nigeria's Central Bank (CBN) launched the eNaira — Africa's first central bank digital currency — timed to coincide with the…
In October 2020 Ant Group — the fintech arm of Alibaba with over one billion users — was two days away from completing the largest IPO in history at…
In the seven days before the infantry assault on 1 July 1916, British artillery fired over 1.5 million shells along a 25-mile front on the Somme, at…
On November 18, 2025, a single database permissions change at Cloudflare caused a Bot Management feature file to double in size. When the oversized…
In July 2018, Dutch journalists at De Correspondent and Bellingcat discovered that Polar Flow's public Explore API returned the full GPS activity…
IronNet Cybersecurity was founded in 2014 by Keith Alexander, the four-star general who ran the NSA for eight years, and raised $247 million —…
In 1281, Kublai Khan launched the largest seaborne invasion in history with 4,400 ships hastily built in under a year. The vessels were structurally…
On 15 October 2022, a fire in an uninterruptible power supply battery room at the SK C&C data centre in Pangyo, South Korea, triggered an automatic…
Completed in 1952 with Soviet assistance and nicknamed the "Iron Dam" for its supposedly indestructible design, the Banqiao reservoir dam in Henan…
Zume Pizza raised $445 million — including a $375 million SoftBank injection at a $2.25 billion valuation — to build a fleet of custom pizza trucks in which robotic arms would prepare and bake pizzas while driving to customers. The ovens proved unreliable at road speed, heat…
On 2 September 1666, a fire started in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane in the City of London and burned for four days. By the time it was…
When Winter Storm Elliott hit the United States on 21 December 2022, every major US airline recovered in 24 to 48 hours. Southwest Airlines kept…
The Tay Bridge opened in May 1878 as the longest railway bridge in the world, spanning 3.5 kilometres across the Firth of Tay between Dundee and…
On 19 July 1545, King Henry VIII stood at Southsea Castle and watched his flagship, the Mary Rose, sail out to repel a French invasion fleet of 225…
On 7 January 2013, a Japan Airlines Boeing 787 caught fire on the ground at Boston Logan Airport. A lithium-ion battery in the auxiliary power unit…
On 25 July 2000, Air France Concorde F-BTSC took off from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport carrying 100 passengers and nine crew on a charter flight…
In 1998, Iridium launched what its engineers genuinely believed would be the telephone network of the future: 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites providing…
In October 2001, Enron Corporation — once the seventh-largest company in the United States by revenue, named 'America's Most Innovative Company' by…
Webvan launched in 1999 with a bold promise: same-day grocery delivery within a 30-minute window, using purpose-built $35M automated warehouses, a…
On 1 June 2009, Air France Flight 447 — an Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard — crashed into the Atlantic Ocean…
On 2 November 1988, a Cornell University graduate student named Robert Tappan Morris released a self-replicating program onto the ARPANET. Within…
Shortly after midnight on 3 December 1984, approximately 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal,…
On 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and injuring 17. The Macondo well blowout —…
On 1 January 2000, the world held its breath as decades of two-digit year storage in software either triggered silent data corruption or — thanks to…
On 15 January 1991, AT&T's long-distance telephone network suffered a nine-hour collapse that blocked approximately 75 million calls — around 60% of…
On 23 August 1991, the Sleipner A concrete gravity base structure — a Norwegian North Sea oil platform under construction — sank in the Gandsfjord during a routine ballast test, killing one worker and resulting in a total loss of approximately $700 million. The platform's…
On 23 July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 — a Boeing 767 with 69 people aboard — ran completely out of fuel at 41,000 feet over Manitoba and had to…
On 22 July 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 Venus probe was destroyed by range safety officers 4 minutes and 53 seconds after launch when its Atlas-Agena…
On 24 April 1990, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope — the most expensive scientific instrument ever built at $1.5 billion — and within weeks…
On 3 December 1999, NASA's Mars Polar Lander fell silent as it entered the Martian atmosphere and was never heard from again. The mission review…
On 25 February 1991, an Iraqi Scud missile struck a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers and wounding 98 — the deadliest…
Between 2009 and 2011, Toyota recalled over 9 million vehicles following reports of unintended acceleration linked to its Electronic Throttle Control…
On 14 August 2003, a race condition in the alarm and event-logging software used by Ohio utility FirstEnergy caused the system to crash silently —…
On 6 May 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 998 points — the largest single-day intraday drop in history — within 36 minutes, briefly…
In 1975, Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the world's first digital camera — a 3.6 kg device that captured 0.01-megapixel images to a cassette tape…
In January 2000, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, America Online — a dial-up internet company with 30 million subscribers and an inflated stock…
On 28 March 1979, a stuck-open pilot-operated relief valve at Unit 2 of Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania caused cooling water…
In October 1994, mathematics professor Thomas Nicely discovered that Intel's flagship Pentium processor returned incorrect results for certain…
On 27 January 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed during a routine pre-launch rehearsal test on Launch Pad 34 at…
'Galloping Gertie', the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, opened on 1 July 1940 as the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. On 7 November 1940 — 129…
The South Sea Company was granted a British monopoly on South American trade in 1711. Its actual trade was minimal, but it compensated by taking on…
In the 1630s Dutch Republic, newly introduced tulips became prestige commodities. Between 1634 and early 1637, prices for rare varieties escalated astronomically: a single Semper Augustus bulb reportedly sold for 10,000 guilders — roughly the price of an Amsterdam canal house.…
Zhongzhi Enterprise Group managed approximately 1 trillion yuan ($140B) in assets through its wealth management subsidiaries, selling products…
iQiyi, the Baidu-backed Chinese video streaming platform known as the 'Netflix of China', listed on Nasdaq in 2018 at a $13.8B valuation. In April…
DiDi Global raised $4.4 billion in its NYSE IPO on 30 June 2021. Two days later, China's Cyberspace Administration launched a cybersecurity review…
LeEco (formerly Letv) grew from a Chinese video streaming platform into what founder Jia Yueting called an 'ecosystem company' spanning internet TV,…
Ofo deployed 10 million dockless bikes across 250 cities in 20 countries, backed by $2.2 billion from Alibaba, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital China.…
Luckin Coffee opened 4,507 stores in 18 months — the fastest expansion in coffee retail history — and listed on Nasdaq in May 2019, raising $561…
Celsius Network offered retail crypto investors yields of up to 18–20% annually, marketed as 'unbank yourself'. It attracted 1.7 million customers…
QuadrigaCX, Canada's largest crypto exchange with 363,000 customers and ~$250M in assets, filed for creditor protection in February 2019. CEO Gerald…
The DAO raised 12.7 million ETH (~$150 million, 14% of all Ether in existence) from 11,000 investors in the largest crowdfunding event in history. On…
Lilium GmbH, the Munich-based eVTOL startup promising 6-passenger flights at 300 km/h, filed for insolvency in October 2024 after burning through…
Virgin Hyperloop raised over $450 million from investors including DP World and Richard Branson's Virgin Group, promising to transport passengers at…
Bird, the electric scooter company that launched in Santa Monica in 2018 and expanded to 350+ cities, went public in November 2021 via SPAC at a $2.3…
Songdo International Business District, built on reclaimed land near Incheon, South Korea, was designed as the world's first purpose-built smart city…
Announced in 2008 with a target completion of 2016 and a budget of $18–22 billion, Masdar City was conceived as a car-free, zero-carbon settlement…
Alphabet's urban innovation subsidiary Sidewalk Labs spent three years and over $50 million designing a 12-acre 'neighbourhood built from the…
Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas on 1 February 2003, killing all seven crew members, as it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of a 16-day science mission. The cause was a briefcase-sized piece of foam that had broken off the external tank during launch and…
Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund co-founded by Nobel Prize economists Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, nearly collapsed the global…
On 19 October 1987, global stock markets crashed simultaneously. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6% in a single session — the largest…
In 2005, Sony BMG was found to have shipped approximately 22 million music CDs containing software that automatically installed a rootkit on Windows…
The Ford Pinto, produced from 1971 to 1980, had a fuel tank positioned between the rear axle and bumper that ruptured and caught fire in rear-end…
Denver International Airport, originally scheduled to open in October 1993, did not open until February 1995 — 16 months late — primarily because its…
The NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), launched in 2003 as the largest civilian IT programme in history, was dismantled in 2011 after spending…
On 11 March 2011, the magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake triggered a 14-metre tsunami that flooded Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The emergency…
Takata Corporation's airbag inflators, fitted to over 100 million vehicles by 19 manufacturers worldwide, were found to rupture violently under heat…
Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashed into Mount Takamagahara on 12 August 1985 after losing its entire vertical stabiliser and all hydraulic systems,…
Between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army launched approximately 9,300 Fu-Go hydrogen balloon bombs from the coast of Japan,…
The IJN Yamato — the largest and most heavily armed battleship ever built — was sunk on 7 April 1945 by 280 US carrier aircraft during Operation…
On 26 April 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded during a scheduled safety test, releasing radiation…
Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven crew members. The cause was an O-ring failure in…
The Soviet N1 rocket, the USSR's answer to Saturn V and intended to land cosmonauts on the Moon, failed all four of its launch attempts between 1969…
The de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner, was grounded after two catastrophic in-flight breakups in early 1954, killing 56…
The German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg burst into flames while docking at Lakehurst, New Jersey on 6 May 1937, killing 36 of the 97 people on board and destroying the $3M (1937) vessel in 34 seconds. The disaster ended the commercial airship era almost overnight. The Hindenburg…
On 10 August 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank less than 1.3 km into her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbour. King Gustav II Adolf had demanded a…
Construction of the Gothic choir at Beauvais Cathedral began in 1225 with a vault height of 48.5 metres — the highest ever attempted. In November…
A malicious actor using the pseudonym "Jia Tan" spent nearly two years contributing to the open-source XZ Utils compression library, building trust…
Apple's Lisa, one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface, launched at $9,995 (equivalent to over $30,000 today). Despite…
Segway launched with extraordinary secrecy and hype — inventor Dean Kamen predicted it would be bigger than the internet and sell 10,000 units per…
Microsoft's Clippy (Office Assistant) was introduced in Office 97 as a help assistant that would detect user intent and offer tips. Instead, it…
OnLive, a pioneering cloud gaming service, shut down its consumer gaming service in 2015 (having previously undergone a restructuring in 2012). Users…
Google disclosed a bug in the Google+ API that had exposed private profile data of up to 500,000 users to third-party app developers since 2015.…
A DDoS attack against Microsoft Azure triggered a defensive response that, due to an error in implementation, amplified the impact of the attack…
Snap manufactured up to 800,000 pairs of Spectacles, its camera-equipped sunglasses, but sold only approximately 150,000 in the first year. The…
Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter was followed by mass layoffs reducing the workforce from approximately 7,500 to under 1,500. Blue checkmark…
Reddit announced API pricing changes in June 2023 that effectively shut down third-party apps including Apollo, which had millions of users.…
OpenAI's board fired CEO Sam Altman without warning in November 2023 for an undisclosed reason. Within 96 hours, nearly all employees signed a letter…
Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed by an Uber autonomous test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. The vehicle's sensors detected her 5.6 seconds before…
Joshua Brown died when his Tesla Model S on Autopilot struck the trailer of a turning truck. The camera-based system failed to distinguish the white…
A Cruise autonomous vehicle struck a pedestrian in San Francisco who had already been hit by another car, then dragged her 20 feet while attempting a pull-over manoeuvre. Cruise initially failed to fully disclose the incident to the California DMV. The company's operating…
Google shut down Google Reader in July 2013, citing declining use as justification. The decision was met with 150,000+ petition signatures and…
Rdio, once regarded as having the best music streaming interface, filed for bankruptcy in November 2015 and shut down. It sold assets to Pandora for…
Yahoo acquired blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013. By 2016, Yahoo wrote down $712 million of that investment, reflecting near-total…
Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom. After a decade of neglect, Yahoo shut it down on October 26,…
WeWork filed for IPO in August 2019 with a $47 billion valuation, revealing massive losses, unusual governance provisions, and self-dealing…
Mt. Gox, which handled 70% of all Bitcoin transactions at its peak, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 citing the theft of 850,000 BTC (worth…
Digg's v4 redesign in August 2010 replaced community voting with an algorithmic feed and gave news publishers preferential placement. The existing…
MySpace confirmed in 2019 that a botched server migration had resulted in the permanent deletion of approximately 50 million songs from 14 million…
Twitter shut down Vine, its short-form video platform, in October 2016, just three years after its acquisition. Twitter gave users 90 days notice and…
Google shut down its Stadia cloud gaming platform in January 2023, less than three years after launch. Users who had purchased games digitally…
Google Wave launched in 2009 as a real-time collaboration platform meant to reinvent email. Despite significant engineering achievement and a…
The TerraUSD (UST) algorithmic stablecoin lost its dollar peg in May 2022, triggering a death spiral with its sister token LUNA. UST was backed not…
FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, collapsed within 72 hours in November 2022 after CoinDesk reported that sister trading firm…
Theranos claimed its Edison device could run hundreds of medical tests from a single finger-prick of blood. In reality, most tests were run on…
Strava released a global heatmap of GPS activity data aggregated from its fitness tracking app. Analysts discovered that in remote regions of Syria,…
Volkswagen equipped approximately 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide with software that detected when an emissions test was being conducted and switched to a low-emissions mode. In normal driving, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times the legal NOx limit. VW paid over $30…
Google launched Buzz, a social layer integrated into Gmail, that automatically followed users' most frequent email contacts and made these lists…
Cambridge Analytica acquired detailed psychological profiles on 87 million Facebook users via a quiz app that exploited Facebook's Graph API to…
Intel's Itanium architecture, developed with HP and launched in 2001 as the successor to x86, never achieved mainstream adoption. The VLIW…
Microsoft's Recall feature for Copilot+ PCs was found to take encrypted screenshots of everything on-screen every few seconds and store them in a…
Apple announced AirPower in September 2017 as a charging mat capable of simultaneously charging iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods anywhere on its…
Bloomberg reporters discovered that Juicero's proprietary juice pouches could be squeezed by hand in the same time and with equal results as the $700…
Nintendo's Virtual Boy launched as a 3D gaming experience but delivered monochrome red-and-black graphics via a stationary headset that required…
HP launched the TouchPad tablet running webOS in July 2011 at iPad-competitive pricing. After 49 days and very poor sales, HP abruptly discontinued…
Microsoft's Kin, a social-media-focused smartphone for teenagers, launched in May 2010 and was discontinued 48 days later. Verizon sold only a few…
Apple replaced Google Maps with its own mapping app in iOS 6. Apple Maps launched with cities misidentified, landmarks in wrong locations, melting…
Windows Vista launched in 2007 after five years of development with new DRM requirements, a resource-heavy Aero interface, and a redesigned driver…
Humane's $699 AI Pin, worn as a lapel device with a projector and AI assistant, launched to devastating reviews. The device overheated, including…
The Rabbit R1, a $199 AI device promising to replace apps with a conversational AI assistant, launched to universally poor reviews. Teardown and…
IBM sold Watson Health to investment firm Francisco Partners after spending over a decade and billions of dollars attempting to apply AI to…
A New York attorney submitted a legal brief in federal court that included six citations to cases fabricated entirely by ChatGPT. The cases had…
Two Boeing 737 MAX crashes — Lion Air 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines 302 in March 2019 — killed 346 people. The MCAS flight control system repeatedly pushed the nose down based on a single faulty angle-of-attack sensor, overriding pilots who were unaware the system…
Amazon built an AI recruiting tool trained on CVs submitted over a 10-year period. Because the tech industry is male-dominated, the model learned to…
Google Photos' image recognition system classified photos of Black individuals as "gorillas." Google's temporary fix was to suppress the label…
Microsoft launched Tay, an AI chatbot designed to learn from conversations on Twitter. Within 24 hours, coordinated users had manipulated Tay into…
Heathrow Terminal 5 opened after 19 years of development but its automated baggage system failed immediately. Over 28,000 bags were mishandled in the…
GitHub was hit by what was then the largest distributed denial-of-service attack on record, peaking at 1.35 Tbps. Attackers exploited publicly…
HealthCare.gov, the US government's Affordable Care Act enrollment portal, crashed immediately on launch day despite months of preparation and $630…
A faulty channel file update in CrowdStrike Falcon's threat detection sensor caused 8.5 million Windows systems to crash with blue screen of death…
A misconfigured BGP update during routine maintenance withdrew all Facebook IP prefixes from the global routing table, making Facebook, Instagram,…
An AWS engineer debugging an S3 billing issue in us-east-1 mistakenly removed too many servers from the subsystem handling index object metadata. S3…
Knight Capital Group lost $440 million in 45 minutes when a software deployment to 8 of their 9 trading servers activated old, repurposed code that…
The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost as it entered Mars orbit because one engineering team provided thruster force data in pound-force·seconds while…
The maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket ended in self-destruction 37 seconds after launch. A 64-bit floating-point value representing horizontal…
Attackers breached Adobe in October 2013 and stole source code for multiple products along with 153 million user records. Passwords were protected…
Researchers disclosed Meltdown and Spectre, fundamental vulnerabilities in the speculative execution designs of virtually all modern CPUs. Meltdown…
Hackers accessed Uber's GitHub repository, found AWS credentials in code, and downloaded data for 57 million riders and drivers in late 2016. Uber's…
Marriott disclosed that attackers had been present in Starwood's reservation database since 2014 — two years before Marriott acquired Starwood. By the time the breach was discovered in 2018, roughly 500 million guest records had been stolen, including 5 million unencrypted…
DarkSide ransomware operators compromised Colonial Pipeline via a leaked VPN credential with no MFA. The company shut down 5,500 miles of pipeline as…
NotPetya, a destructive wiper disguised as ransomware, spread via a trojanised Ukrainian accounting software update and EternalBlue. It destroyed…
WannaCry ransomware spread globally using EternalBlue, an NSA exploit for a Windows SMB vulnerability (MS17-010) leaked by the Shadow Brokers group.…
CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j allowed unauthenticated remote code execution via a JNDI lookup triggered simply by logging a crafted string. Log4j…
State-sponsored attackers (later attributed to Russia's SVR) inserted malicious code into SolarWinds' Orion network monitoring platform during the…
Attackers compromised Target's network by first breaching an HVAC contractor with network access. They then moved laterally to point-of-sale systems…
Attackers compromised Sony's PlayStation Network in April 2011, stealing names, addresses, email addresses, and potentially credit card data for 77…
Tesla recalled all 3,878 Cybertrucks sold in the US in April 2024 after discovering that a trim component inside the accelerator pedal assembly could…
Verizon sold blogging platform Tumblr to Automattic — parent company of WordPress.com — in August 2019 for a reported sum under $3 million. Yahoo had…
Amazon discontinued its Fire Phone in September 2015, just 13 months after its June 2014 launch. The company took a $170 million inventory write-down…
A missing bounds check in OpenSSL's heartbeat extension (CVE-2014-0160) allowed any attacker to read 64KB of server memory per request, potentially…
Electric vehicle startup Fisker filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2024 having raised over $1 billion and delivered approximately 10,000 Fisker…
The UK Ministry of Defence's Ajax armoured reconnaissance vehicle programme — contracted in 2014 for 589 vehicles at £5.5 billion — remained…
Google shut down Google+ for consumers on 2 April 2019. The closure was triggered by two security incidents: a March 2018 bug exposing private data…
Attackers exploited an unpatched Apache Struts vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) to breach Equifax and exfiltrate the personal data of 147 million…
The US Army issued a directive in August 2017 ordering all units to immediately cease use of DJI drone products and remove them from service. The directive cited 'cyber vulnerabilities' and concerns about data — including flight logs, GPS coordinates, and imagery — being…
Google quietly ended its Glass Explorer Programme in January 2015 after three years of a limited $1,500-per-unit beta. Approximately 8,000 units were…
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration forced Tesla to recall approximately 2 million vehicles in December 2023 following a two-year…
Amazon announced Prime Air drone delivery in December 2013 with a promise of 30-minute package delivery. A decade later, the service had made fewer…
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme, contracted in 2001 with initial delivery projected for 2010, had accumulated a projected lifetime cost of…
Quibi, a short-form mobile streaming service backed by $1.75 billion in funding, shut down in October 2020 just six months after its April 2020…
Yahoo disclosed in 2016 that a 2013 breach had compromised 500 million accounts. A year later, the company revised the figure to 3 billion — every…
Samsung recalled its Galaxy Note 7 flagship smartphone worldwide in October 2016 after batteries spontaneously caught fire during charging. The…
The Therac-25 radiation therapy machine killed at least six patients and seriously injured others between 1985 and 1987. A software race condition…
