■ ParamLab · Season 1 · 1 of 8 shipped
One failure per episode. The real mechanism as running code, the bug you can trigger, the fix, and the test that proves it. Everything open source, every claim sourced.
Try it now · 4 June 1996
Ariane 5 reused guidance code from Ariane 4. One value, the horizontal bias, was converted from a 64-bit float into a 16-bit integer with no range check. Ariane 4 never flew fast enough to overflow it. Ariane 5 did, 37 seconds after launch.
Drag the slider past 32,767. Episode 01 rebuilds the full flight software.
| Ref | Subject | The one-line version | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| EP-00 | Launch | Why rebuild disasters at all | Published |
| EP-01 | Ariane 51996 | A 64-bit number squeezed into 16 bits | In progress |
| EP-02 | Mars Climate Orbiter1999 | Pounds on one side, newtons on the other | Planned |
| EP-03 | Patriot missile, Dhahran1991 | A clock that drifted a third of a second | Planned |
| EP-04 | Therac-251985–87 | A race condition in a radiation machine | Planned |
| EP-05 | Knight Capital2012 | A reused feature flag, $440M in 45 minutes | Planned |
| EP-06 | Cloudflare outage2019 | One regex took down a global network | Planned |
| EP-07 | CrowdStrike2024 | A config file that crashed 8.5M machines | Planned |