🕵️ POST-MORTEM DETECTIVE+350 XP BADGE REWARD

WHAT BROKE?

Inspect real production telemetry and symptoms from history's most expensive engineering outages. Deduce the exact root cause!

INCIDENT 1 OF 6SCORE: 0 SOLVED

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2012 · Knight Capital Group

The $440M 45-Minute Algorithmic Meltdown

💥 $440,000,000 (~$10M / minute)

INCIDENT TELEMETRY & REPORTED SYMPTOMS:

>Market opens at 9:30 AM EST; automated high-frequency trading system goes completely berserk.

>The firm sends millions of market buy orders at the ask and sells at the bid across 154 NYSE stocks.

>Within 45 minutes, 397 million shares were traded, accumulating a catastrophic $7B unwanted long position.

>Engineers try pulling routers and reverting code, but the chaos keeps compounding.

WHAT WAS THE PRIMARY ROOT CAUSE?

HOW IT WORKS & METHODOLOGY

UNDERSTANDING THE MATH, FORMULAS & CALCULATION ENGINE

Inspect System Telemetry

Review real timestamps, system log snippets, metrics, and deployment sequences from verified historical tech outages.

Deduce the Root Cause

Analyze the engineering anomaly and choose the exact underlying failure mechanism from plausible architectural hypotheses.

Learn Incident Lessons

Read the architectural breakdown and defense-in-depth mitigations that the industry adopted following the disaster.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS EXPERIMENT

Q1.Are the post-mortem scenarios based on real events?↓

Yes. Every scenario covers real incidents including the $440M Knight Capital automated trading glitch, the July 2024 CrowdStrike kernel null dereference, Mars Climate Orbiter metric conversion loss, Ariane 5 integer overflow, Cloudflare ReDoS, and Meta BGP route withdrawal.

Q2.How does this game improve debugging skills?↓

By training software engineers and SREs to distinguish symptoms (e.g. crashing servers or high memory) from true root causes (e.g. configuration flags, unit mismatches, or BGP teardowns).

Q3.Can I suggest new post-mortem incidents?↓

Yes! Check our dev roadmap on GitHub to submit verified post-mortems with publicly published RCA documents.

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