Falsification wing

False islands

Five systems that were called stable and were sitting on a boundary, coded under one protocol, with the evidence that existed before the failure.

5 cases, draft, one per type 1 control candidate, 2 required Forecasts: 4 open, with probabilities Second coder: none yet

Nothing on this page is a measurement. The cases are readings of public investigation records, coded by the author under the protocol below and not yet checked by a second coder. The forecasts are dated claims that have not resolved. Both are plans for being wrong in public. Neither is a result.

The base-rate problem. Evidence dated before a failure exists in nearly every system, including ones that never failed. Field five is hindsight with a timestamp unless controls carry the same field and are coded blind to outcome. That is why two coded controls are a launch condition, not an appendix.

The protocol

Every case carries the same seven fields. A case that cannot fill the fifth field is not a false island. It is hindsight, and it is left out.

Claim. The statement that the system was stable, quoted or paraphrased, with who made it.
Stabilizer. What was holding the system up.
Fragility location. Where the stabilizer concentrated risk.
What broke. The failure, in a sentence or two.
Evidence dated before the failure. The column that separates a false island from hindsight. Documents, reports, or warnings that carry a date earlier than the failure.
Type. One of five: subsidized, plateau, unobservable cliff, no passage, or exit through the stabilizer. The five types are defined below.
Sources. The documents the coding rests on. Named, not linked, until verified.

The five types

Subsidized: Stability purchased by a hidden stabilizer that concentrates fragility in one component.
Plateau: A system running near its edge whose instruments hid the proximity, so apparent stability was stickiness.
Unobservable cliff: The boundary lay outside the range the design considered and outside routine measurement.
No passage: No route back once the transition began. The failure was in the transit.
Exit through the stabilizer: The stabilizer itself was the path by which the system left the island.

Selection

The five cases were chosen one per type, deliberately, so that each type has a worked example. That is a design choice, not a coincidence, and it means the set cannot show how often each type occurs.

Cases considered and not selected:

Candidate	Reason not selected
Challenger, 1986	The pre-dated evidence is so widely known that the field-five test would be trivial.
Deepwater Horizon, 2010	The timeline has several contested accounts, so the pre-dated column cannot be filled without adjudication.
Chernobyl, 1986	The stability claim was not public in the sense the protocol requires.

The base-rate argument applies to case selection as much as to controls, so the selection is published.

Rules. Regulator-grade or investigator-grade timelines only. No verdicts on live systems here. Those go to the forecasts below with a named resolver. No second human coder exists yet. Where a model coded a case blind to the thesis, that is stated. Every case and every control is to be coded blind to outcome by two independent coders, and the agreement statistic is published. Until then, each case is a single reading by the author. These five are drafts and their sources are to be verified before publication. No claimant with whom the author is in an active hiring or sales conversation. Additions and withdrawals for that reason are logged privately. The public log shows only the row count.

The five cases

Five drafts, in the order they were coded. Each was coded by the author from the sources named. No case has yet been coded by a model blind to the thesis. When one is, the case will say so. Numbers quoted inside the cases are taken from the named sources and are to be verified with them.

Exit through the stabilizer. 19 July 2024

CrowdStrike

Claim: Endpoint protection as the enterprise's immune system, updated continuously. A paraphrase of the vendor's framing, repeated by customers and analysts, not a single quotation.
Stabilizer: A kernel-level sensor with rapid content updates.
Fragility location: The update channel itself, which reached about 8.5 million Windows hosts at once.
What broke: A content update, Channel File 291, crashed hosts at boot. Airlines, hospitals and banks lost service. Typed as exit through the stabilizer. It is not a metastable failure in the sense of Bronson et al., since it had no sustaining loop and ended when the trigger was reverted. Those are two different classifications: the type answers how the island was left, the Bronson question answers whether the failure sustained itself.
Evidence dated before: In April 2024 a sensor update crashed Debian servers at one customer, and in June 2024 Red Hat warned of kernel panics involving the sensor on RHEL 9.4, with similar reports on Rocky Linux. One later analysis attributed the Linux crashes to a kernel bug exposed by the sensor rather than to the sensor itself. Either way, the same delivery channel had produced boot failures three months before 19 July. Verified against The Register and Computing, July 2024.
Sources: CrowdStrike's preliminary post-incident review and root cause analysis, August 2024. Microsoft's estimate of affected hosts.
Status: draft, one field verified

Subsidized island. October 2018 to March 2019

Boeing 737 MAX

Claim: A re-engined airframe that handles like its predecessor, so no new type rating. Boeing's position to the regulator and to airline customers, paraphrased.
Stabilizer: MCAS, software that trimmed the nose down.
Fragility location: A single angle-of-attack sensor input, not described to pilots.
What broke: Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian 302.
Evidence dated before: After Lion Air, the FAA's own risk analysis projected further fatal accidents over the fleet's life without a fix, and the type kept flying.
Sources: The House Transportation Committee report, 2020. The FAA TARAM analysis as reported by the committee. The NTSB safety recommendation report, 2019, and the Ethiopian and Indonesian final accident reports.
Status: draft, sources to be verified

Unobservable cliff. 11 March 2011

Fukushima Daiichi

Claim: Sea defences and backup power sized to the design-basis tsunami. TEPCO's position, accepted by the regulator, paraphrased.
Stabilizer: Diesel generators and switchgear in basements behind defenses built to a 5.7-meter design-basis tsunami. Verified: TEPCO interim report, December 2011.
Fragility location: Backup power sited below the flood line.
What broke: A tsunami far above the design basis flooded the generators. Station blackout, then three meltdowns.
Evidence dated before: TEPCO's 2008 internal estimate of a tsunami above 15 meters at the site, not acted on.
Sources: The Diet's independent investigation commission report, 2012. The IAEA report, 2015.
Status: draft, one field verified

Plateau. 14 August 2003

Northeast blackout

Claim: A grid operated within limits, with alarms to warn operators of trouble. The operating assumption at the utility and its reliability coordinator, as reconstructed by the task force, paraphrased.
Stabilizer: The control-room alarm and state-estimation software.
Fragility location: The alarm processor, which failed silently, so operators worked without alarms for over an hour.
What broke: Overloaded lines sagged into untrimmed trees and tripped in sequence. The cascade reached about 50 million customers.
Evidence dated before: Vegetation management gaps and reliability findings in the years before, per the task force. Prior alarm issues (to verify).
Sources: The US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force final report, 2004.
Status: draft, sources to be verified

No passage. 1 August 2012

Knight Capital

Claim: A tested router deployment with a rollback plan. Knight's internal assumption, as described in the SEC order, paraphrased.
Stabilizer: A manual deployment to eight servers.
Fragility location: A repurposed flag that reactivated dormant code on the one server the deployment missed, and no fast route back.
What broke: About 440 million dollars of unintended orders in about 45 minutes.
Evidence dated before: 97 automated emails before the market opened flagging the error, not acted on, per the SEC order.
Sources: SEC administrative order, October 2013.
Status: draft, sources to be verified

Control candidate. April 2011

Control candidate: Netflix during the April 2011 AWS outage

Five failures alone cannot test the protocol. Claimed islands that held are required as controls, at least two of them, coded under the same seven fields, so the fields can be seen to separate the two outcomes. Netflix's reported continuity through the multi-day Amazon Web Services outage of April 2011 is the candidate. It is a candidate only. It has not been coded, its claim and stabilizer have not been written up, and its sources have not been collected. If it fails the protocol on inspection, another control will be sought and the substitution logged by date.

Status: candidate, not yet coded

Controls

The protocol requires at least two claimed islands that held under a documented shock, with investigator-grade timelines, coded by a coder who receives the pre-shock timeline without the ending. Netflix during the April 2011 AWS outage is the first candidate. A second is to be nominated before launch.

Rejected candidates

Candidate	Reason rejected
Theranos	A fraud, not a stability claim. The protocol admits only claims made in good faith about a system's resilience.
Y2K	A predicted failure that did not occur. There was no claimed island, so it fits neither the cases nor the controls.

Rejected candidates are published so the selection can be checked.

Forecasts

Dated forward forecasts with named public resolvers and a stated probability. Scored once a year by hit rate and by mean Brier score, without base-rate subtraction. Forecasts that resolve on the author's own harness (F1 and F2) form a self-resolved pool, scored and reported separately from the independently resolved pool (F3 and F4). The self-resolved share of the scored set is capped at half. Regime-level calls are to be placed on Long Bets under the author's name. One is listed below, not yet placed. A forecast enters the table of open forecasts only with frozen wording, a resolver, a deadline, and a probability.

Four open forecasts with probabilities, none resolved. "Resolves by" is the deadline for scoring, not a prediction of when the event occurs. "p" is the stated probability.
#	Forecast	Resolver	p	Resolves by	Status
F1	Snapshot 2's viable fraction on the same task will be no larger than snapshot 1's.	The harness's public logs self-resolved	0.6	2027-09	open
F2	Rerun jitter on the hosted model will exceed 5 percentage points on at least one of three cells (50 reruns each). This is jitter, not sampling error.	The harness's public logs self-resolved	0.7	2026-11	open
F3	Among federal Chief AI Officers designated under OMB M-24-10, the dedicated role reporting to the CIO will show the shortest median observed tenure at a 2028 re-snapshot.	Public agency records	0.55	2028-06	open
F4	Within eighteen months, at least one published postmortem of a correlated multi-provider outage will show that multi-model routing sold as resilience did not prevent customer-visible failure.	Published postmortems	0.65	2028-03	open

Listed, not scored

Item	Why unscored
Gartner's June 2025 prediction that over 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.	No public resolver.
A Long Bets entry that by 2030 a majority of S&P 500 firms that announced an enterprise AI operating model in 2024 will have changed it.	Not yet placed.
A proxy for regime dwell time in AI-exposed software categories showing shortening between 2024 and 2027.	Proxy unnamed.

Resolution day is once a year. Misses are entered in the changelog on the Theory page as dated events.

What this page will not do

No verdicts on already-failed systems beyond the five coded cases. The list grows only when a new case passes the protocol, including the fifth field.
No right of reply theatre. The sources are public investigations. Anyone named can point to the record, and any correction is logged by date.
No scraping of incident databases. Cases are read one at a time from primary documents.
No claimant with whom the author is in an active hiring or sales conversation. Additions and withdrawals for that reason are logged privately. The public log shows only the row count.