CH 73Systems & technology
The computer said the cash was missing
Post Office Horizon scandal
Post Office Horizon, 1999 onward: why was the computer believed when it reported missing money?
Dossier · 12 case files · 1999–2025
Recent investigations: outages, blackouts and failures of the 2020s.
The CrowdStrike outage, the xz backdoor, the Iberian blackout, the AWS outage, Alaska 1282, Titan and more, read from the official findings.
Backdrop: A Post Office counter in Seaforth, photographed in 2021, shown for setting. It is not a branch named in the case. Rodhullandemu · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons.
Recent failures are usually argued about before the evidence is in. These investigations work from the record instead: vendors' root-cause analyses, grid operators' expert panels, safety boards' final reports and court judgments, each with its date and its limits stated.
Read together they show the newest failures repeating old patterns. A configuration change reaches every machine at once, one automated process races another, a voltage control scheme fails across a whole peninsula, a hull is trusted beyond its testing. The technology is new; the chain of causes is familiar.
In date order of the event. Each file is a full investigation: briefing, source-linked evidence, reasoning steps and findings.
CH 79Systems & energy
Why so many plants stopped at once
Texas grid freeze (2021)
The Texas grid, 2021: which failures pushed the system to the edge of collapse?
CH 66Engineering & technology
Readings from a hull under strain
Titan submersible implosion (2023)
Titan submersible, 2023: what did the hull’s own monitoring data show before the final dive?
CH 67Engineering & technology
A chip 24 billion kilometers away
Voyager 1 memory fault (2023–2024)
Voyager 1, November 2023 to April 2024: how did engineers diagnose a failed memory chip from interstellar distance, and work around it?
CH 74Systems & finance
Safe bonds and a two-day run
Silicon Valley Bank failure (2023)
Silicon Valley Bank, 2023: how did a bank with mostly safe securities fail in two days?
CH 80Science & Discovery
The flake that hung halfway
LK-99 superconductor claim (2023)
LK-99 claim, 2023: did a copper-doped lead compound superconduct at room temperature?
CH 55Engineering & technology
A content file that was not code
CrowdStrike outage (2024)
CrowdStrike Falcon content update, 2024: how could one update crash Windows machines when the sensor code had not changed?
CH 56Engineering & technology
The half-second login
xz Utils backdoor (2024)
xz Utils backdoor, 2024: what small anomaly exposed malicious code hidden in release files?
CH 65Engineering & technology
A plug closed without its bolts
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 door plug (2024)
Alaska Airlines 1282, 2024: how did a 737 MAX 9 leave the factory without the bolts that held a door plug in place?
CH 68Engineering & technology
A landing on featureless sand
Ingenuity Mars helicopter final flight (2024)
Ingenuity Mars helicopter, 18 January 2024: what brought down the first aircraft on another world?
CH 57Engineering & technology
A DNS record with no addresses
AWS us-east-1 outage (2025)
AWS us-east-1 outage, 2025: how did an automated DNS system leave a core service with an empty address?
CH 59Engineering & technology
Voltage the grid could not hold
Iberian blackout (2025)
Spain and Portugal, 28 April 2025: what caused the grid to collapse?
From the journal
The ideas behind these cases.
- Reading a post-incident review and what it leaves outA company's own post-incident review can be accurate and still incomplete. Learn to check who wrote it, when, in which time zone, and what it cannot show.
- Trust in the update pipeline: why one file reaches everyoneSoftware reaches users through tests, staging and review. Four cases show what those steps assume, and why one bad update can spread at once.
- Why power grids collapse: voltage, frequency and visibilityA grid collapses when voltage, frequency or margins pass their limits faster than operators and protection can respond. Three case files show how.
Other topicsSoftware failures 15Aviation and spaceflight 16Bridges, buildings and structures 12Energy and power grids 7Medicine and public health 11Mysteries and open questions 7Extraordinary claims and replication 9Markets, money and fraud 6Weather, climate and the Earth 11Ships and the sea 9Astronomy and physics 13