Failure Modes

What it does

Failure Modes is a curated list of resources around how modern and complex software systems fail. We have resources centered around failures and failures modes in software systems.

Failure Modes is a community of software practitioners to discuss and share stories about failures in production systems. We focus on understanding how systems fail and learning from those incidents. We host exclusive, invite-only meetups in Bangalore, India, providing a safe space to discuss failures under the Chatham House Rule . Dive into real-world postmortems and insights from the community. Explore our curated resources about building robust softwarefrom failuremodes.dev

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  I built a reference site for the recurring hard problems in softwareApr 2026 · thehardparts.dev · ▲9

  Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…

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  Subtle Failure Modes I Keep Seeing in Production‑Grade AI Systems2025 · github.com · ▲6

  Hi HN, Over the past two years I’ve built and debugged a fair number of production pipelines—mainly retrieval‑augmented generation stacks, agent frameworks, and multi‑step reasoning services. A pattern emerged: most incidents weren’t outright crashes, but silent structural faults that slowly compromised relevance, accuracy, or stability. I began logging every recurring fault in a shared notebook. Colleagues started using the list for post‑mortems, so I turned it into a small public reference: 16 distinct failure modes (semantic drift after chunking, embedding/meaning mismatches,…

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  Awful OSS Incidents2022 · github.com · ▲63

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  Pokemon Go Fails2016 · ▲110

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  FailScout2022 · ▲94

  A crowdsourced collection about how things break.

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  List of serverless failure stories2019 · github.com · ▲75

  Compilation of public failure/horror stories related to Serverless, inspired by hjacobs/kubernetes-failure-stories - cristim/serverless-failure-stories

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