Why we tell these stories

Every engineer who has carried a pager has a story they cannot forget. The outage that taught them something true. The dashboard that lied to their face. The alert that stayed silent at the worst possible moment. These stories get told once on the incident bridge, maybe again in the postmortem, and then they fade. The lesson fades with them.

o11yhorrors exists to keep those lessons by the fire, where the next engineer can find them. We believe incidents are the best teachers observability has, and that a good war story does more to make someone careful than any checklist ever could.

What we believe

Systems fail in ways their builders did not imagine. The signals we trust can go stale, go quiet, or quietly lie. The tools we build to see more clearly can be the very things that blind us. None of this is a sign of bad engineers. It is the nature of complex systems, and the only honest response is to share what we learned when ours surprised us.

Blameless is the rule here. The tales name failures, not people. Service names are changed, companies are left out, and the focus stays where it belongs: on what happened, why, and what to do differently.

How the fire stays lit

The collection grows from submissions. An engineer sends a story, a human reads it, and the good ones are published with whatever name the teller chooses. There is no automated firehose and no scraping. Every tale here was offered on purpose by someone who lived it.

If you have a story that still haunts you, tell it around the fire. If you just want to learn, start with the tales or the lessons behind them.

May your dashboards never lie to you again.

Reach us at tales@o11yhorrors.com.