19 JUL 2024 — CROWDSTRIKE OUTAGE
The field that didn't fit
$5.4BN
A content file defined 21 input fields; the sensor supplied 20. A validator let the mismatch through, and roughly 8.5 million Windows devices crashed. Parametrix estimated $5.4bn in direct losses across the Fortune 500 (excluding Microsoft). The culprit was found only in a root-cause analysis published 18 days later. It was, literally, a field-count mismatch at a handoff.
SOURCE: STRATRIX SUMMARY OF CROWDSTRIKE PIR/RCA + PARAMETRIX
1 AUG 2012 — KNIGHT CAPITAL
Seven servers out of eight
~$440M
New trading code was copied by hand to 7 of 8 servers. The eighth reactivated dormant code through a repurposed flag. In about 45 minutes the firm lost roughly $440M pre-tax and was rescued by merger. No single view existed across all eight steps of the chain.
SOURCE: SUMMARY OF SEC ORDER 34-70694
14 FEB 2024 — MOFFATT v. AIR CANADA
“The chatbot did it” is not a defence
C$812.02
An airline's website chatbot invented a bereavement-fare rule that contradicted the airline's own policy page. The airline argued it shouldn't be liable for its chatbot's words. The tribunal called that “a remarkable submission”: the chatbot is part of the website, and the company is responsible for all of it.
SOURCE: CASE NOTE ON 2024 BCCRT 149
OCT 2019 — HEALTHCARE ALGORITHM STUDY
The culprit was a field definition
−84%
A risk algorithm applied to some 200 million people a year used healthcare cost as a proxy field for health need. At equal scores, Black patients were sicker — the bias lived upstream, invisible in the outputs. Correcting the proxy cut the measured bias by about 84%. Nobody had traced the field.
SOURCE: SUMMARY OF OBERMEYER ET AL., SCIENCE 2019
READ THE PATTERN, NOT THE HEADLINES: in every case the failure travelled through a chain of handoffs, and the expensive question afterwards was always the same — which step did this? Some of these systems were not AI agents at all. That honesty is the point: chains of automated handoffs predate agents, and agents have made the chains longer, faster and harder to watch. Checked Agents exists to answer the question while it is still cheap.