Postmortem Index

Explore incident reports from various companies

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  • cascading-failure

Category

Cascading Failure

One small failure that snowballed: retries, thundering herds, or thread pool exhaustion that took out adjacent services.

Postmortems
38
Companies
25
Years covered
37
Date range
Jan 1990 – Feb 2026
Title Company Date Other categories
GitHub Actions and Codespaces outage of February 2026 GitHub 2026-02-02 – 2026-02-03
Automation Config Change Security
incident.io service disruption during AWS us-east-1 outage on October 20, 2025 incident.io 2025-10-20
Automation Cloud Config Change
LaunchDarkly service disruption due to AWS us-east-1 outage and internal cascading failures (October 2025) Launchdarkly 2025-10-20 – 2025-10-21
Automation Cloud
incident.io database outage due to PGAudit incident.io 2025-04-09
GitHub DNS infrastructure failure and service degradation on October 11, 2024 GitHub 2024-10-11 – 2024-10-12
Automation Config Change Security
Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage due to Flexential Power Failure Cloudflare 2023-11-02 – 2023-11-04
Hardware
Datadog Infrastructure Connectivity Issue March 2023 Datadog 2023-03-08 – 2023-03-10
Automation Cloud Security
BigQuery Storage WriteAPI elevated error rates in US Multi-Region Google 2022-10-13 – 2022-10-14
Automation Cloud Time
Honeycomb Ingest System Outage: Shepherd Cache Delays Honeycomb 2022-09-08
Cloud Config Change
Slack’s Incident on 2-22-22 Slack 2022-02-22
Automation Cloud Config Change
GitHub November 2021 Availability Incident due to MySQL Schema Migration Github 2021-11-27
Automation Cloud Config Change Security
CircleCI jobs stuck in "not running" state on November 8, 2021 CircleCI 2021-11-08
Config Change
Cloudflare API and dashboard availability incident on 2020-11-02 Cloudflare 2020-11-02
Automation Security
Datadog US region infrastructure connectivity issue DataDog 2020-09-24 – 2020-09-25
Automation Cloud Security
Flowdock outage and cross-organization data leak Broadcom (CA Technologies) 2020-04-21 – 2020-04-22
Cloud
Cloudflare global outage on July 2, 2019 Cloudflare 2019-07-02
Config Change Security
Google Cloud internal blob storage disruption March 2019 Google 2019-03-13
Cloud Config Change
Elastic Cloud AWS us-east-1 outage of February 2019 Elastic 2019-02-04
Automation Cloud Config Change Security
Authentication Latency on DUO1 Deployment Duo 2018-08-29
Config Change
Unavailable Guilds & Connection Issues Discord 2017-10-13
Cloud Config Change
Discord Connectivity Issues (March 2017) Discord 2017-03-20
Cloud Config Change
Leap second affected Cloudflare DNS Cloudflare 2017-01-01
Time
Buildkite outage of August 22nd, 2016 Buildkite 2016-08-22
Automation Cloud Config Change
GitHub January 28th, 2016 datacenter power disruption GitHub 2016-01-28
Automation Cloud Config Change Hardware Security
CircleCI DB performance issue CircleCI 2015-07-07 – 2015-07-08
Config Change
NPM Fastly VCL misconfiguration outage on 2014-01-28 NPM 2014-01-28
GitHub DNS Outage on January 8, 2014 GitHub 2014-01-08
Automation Config Change Security
Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring application outage on October 23, 2013 Stackdriver 2013-10-23 – 2013-10-26
Automation Cloud Config Change
India NEW grid blackouts Indian Electricity Grid (POSOCO / CERC) 2012-07-30 – 2012-07-31
Hardware
Windows Azure Service Disruption on Feb 29th, 2012 Azure 2012-02-29 – 2012-03-01
Cloud Config Change
Northeast blackout of 2003 FirstEnergy / General Electric 2003-08-14 – 2003-08-16
Hardware Security
Northeast blackout U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force 2003-08-14 – 2003-08-18
Hardware
Ariane 5 Flight 501 launch failure of June 1996 European Space Agency 1996-06-04
Automation
1990 AT&T Long Distance Network Collapse AT&T 1990-01-15
Untitled postmortem Elastic
Automation Cloud Config Change Security
GitHub availability incidents in February and March 2026 GitHub
Automation Cloud Config Change Security
Multiple Slack service disruptions in October 2014 Slack
Automation Security
Supermarket Intermittent Unresponsiveness Chef.io
Automation Cloud Config Change