// DAMAGE_CLOCK — avg rate since 558
By The Numbers
estimated total damage since 558 — ticking at $66/sec
Based on 171 documented incidents spanning 1468 years. Rate = total damage ÷ timespan. Recalculates with every new article. Methodology →
01. The Big Picture
02. The Nerd Stats
// BURN_RATE
Money burned per hour since the oldest documented incident (Hagia Sophia, 558). That's $2.1B/year averaged across 1468 years of human folly.
// STACK_HEIGHT
Stacked in $100 bills (0.109 mm each), the total damage would reach 3,323 km — 8.3× the distance to the ISS (400 km orbit). That's 0.0086× the distance to the Moon, or 378× the height of Everest.
// MOST_EXPENSIVE_INCIDENT
Chernobyl Reactor 4 Explodes During Safety Test That Had Disabled Its Safety Systems — the single most costly incident in the archive.
// MOST_EXPENSIVE_BUG_PER_CHARACTER
Mariner 1 (1962): a missing overbar symbol in the guidance code destroyed a $195M rocket 4 minutes after launch. One character. One rocket. Gone.
// WORLD_GDP_FRACTION
Total documented damage represents 2.8% of current world GDP (~$110 trillion). In other words, our archive documents enough damage to run the entire global economy for 10 days.
// ISS_FUNDING
The International Space Station costs ~$3 billion/year to operate. The documented damage in our archive could fund it for 1,016 years — until the year 3042.
03. The Human Cost
Financial figures dominate tech failure coverage. But some of these incidents killed people. This section documents the confirmed death toll and its theoretical long-term impact.
// GENERATIONAL_LOSS_MODEL
For each incident with documented fatalities: each person who died had a line of descendants that was cut short. We model: generation length = 28 years, children per person = 2.1 (global average). For each incident, we calculate generations elapsed since the incident year, then sum the theoretical descendants across all generations. The result is a conservative estimate of people who theoretically never existed due to each incident.
This is a thought exercise, not a precise demographic projection. It is presented as a sense-of-scale metric, not a moral calculus. The goal is to make the scale of human loss harder to dismiss.
| Incident | Year | Confirmed deaths | Generations since | Theoretical descendants lost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banqiao Dam: China's "Iron Dam" Collapses and Kills 170… | 1975 | 170,000 | 1 | 357,000 |
| Kublai Khan’s Invasion Fleet Is Destroyed After Enginee… | 1281 | 100,000 | 26 | 45,554,183,915,629 |
| Somme Barrage: 1.5 Million Shells, Seven Days of Fire —… | 1916 | 57,470 | 3 | 906,359 |
| Spain's 'Invincible' Armada Routed: Wrong Ships, Incomp… | 1588 | 15,000 | 15 | 1,950,746,850 |
| IJN Yamato — World's Most Powerful Battleship Sunk by A… | 1945 | 3,056 | 2 | 19,895 |
| Ford Pinto's Fatal Fuel Tank Could Be Fixed for $11 Per… | 1978 | 500 | 1 | 1,050 |
| Henry VIII Orders More Guns: The Mary Rose Is Overloade… | 1545 | 500 | 17 | 286,763,042 |
| The Tay Bridge Opens to National Celebration. Eighteen … | 1879 | 75 | 5 | 5,705 |
| Total | 347,116 | 45,563,257,800,209 | ||
Only incidents with confirmed fatality figures are included. Many more incidents caused indirect deaths not captured here. "Theoretical descendants lost" = sum(2.1n, n = 1 … generations since incident), based on a global average of 2.1 children per person and 28-year generation length.
04. Who's Responsible
Leadership attribution for incidents where the primary decision-maker is publicly identifiable. This is about power and accountability, not blame. The question is whether failure rates match leadership representation.
Of 66 attributable incidents (105 unattributed/institutional of 171 total):
93.9% of attributable fails were led by men. Given men hold ~83% of tech leadership roles (Crunchbase baseline), their “fair share” of tech fails would be 83%. They are over-represented by 10.9 percentage points.
Attribution methodology: incidents are tagged based on the primary publicly-named decision-maker at the time of the failure. Institutional/government incidents where individual leadership is unclear are excluded from the attributable count. This covers 66 of 171 incidents.
05. The Calendar of Failure
Based on 74 incidents with known founding dates. Do some months produce more failures than others — or are companies just unlucky when they launch?
// FOUNDING_MONTH — when were these companies born?
Worst: Apr (8 companies). 74 companies with known founding month.
// FAIL_MONTH — when did they crash?
Worst: Oct (21 incidents). Based on all 171 incidents.
06. The Acceleration
Tech failure is not evenly distributed across time. As technology penetrated every layer of society, so did the damage when it broke. 19 incidents predate 1960 — the chart below shows the era where scale became systemic.
// INCIDENTS_PER_DECADE
* 2020s: only 6 years of data. Annualised rate = 70 incidents/decade — on track to be the worst.
// DAMAGE_PER_DECADE
1990s damage dominated by Y2K ($300B) and Black Monday ($528B). 2020s damage includes Chernobyl ($739B, incident 1986, added to archive in current decade).
07. Concentration
Tech failure follows a power law. A handful of catastrophic incidents account for the overwhelming majority of documented damage — the rest are expensive footnotes.
| Incident | Year | Est. Damage | Share of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chernobyl Reactor 4 Explodes During Safety Test That Ha… | 1986 | $738.5B | 24.2% |
| Black Monday: Portfolio Insurance Algorithms Cascade an… | 1987 | $527.5B | 17.3% |
| Y2K: A Two-Digit Year Shortcut From the 1960s Costs the… | 2000 | $300.0B | 9.8% |
| Ant Group's $37 Billion IPO Is Pulled 48 Hours Before L… | 2020 | $237.0B | 7.8% |
| Fukushima Daiichi: Backup Generators Were in the Baseme… | 2011 | $200.0B | 6.6% |
| F-35 Programme Reaches $1.7 Trillion Lifetime Cost — Tw… | 2023 | $170.0B | 5.6% |
| AOL–Time Warner: $350 Billion Merger Produces $99 Billi… | 2002 | $99.0B | 3.2% |
| Enron's 'Code of Ethics' Covers 64 Pages — Its Accounti… | 2001 | $74.0B | 2.4% |
| Deepwater Horizon: Blowout Preventer Fails to Close, Ki… | 2010 | $65.0B | 2.1% |
| DiDi Lists on NYSE Without Data Regulator Sign-Off, Los… | 2021 | $60.0B | 2.0% |
// FASTEST_TO_FAIL
Youngest companies at time of failure (5 shown, of 73 with known founding year)
// OLDEST_TO_FAIL
Legacy companies that failed despite (or because of) age
08. Repeat Offenders
Some names appear in the archive more than once. Attribution is based on title matching — a company appears here if it is the primary subject of the documented incident.
Total damage shown is the sum of all documented incidents for that company in the archive. A company appearing many times does not necessarily mean it causes the most damage — small repeated failures can matter more than one large one.
09. Context
World GDP ($110T)
Our archive = 2.8% of world GDP
ISS annual budget ($3B/yr)
Archive damage could fund the ISS for 1,016 years
Most expensive per character
$195M — Mariner 1’s missing overbar, 1962. One symbol. One lost rocket.
Burn rate since 558
$236,940/hour averaged across 1468 years of documented failure