The City That Burned

The dashboard showed green. Every metric, every heartbeat, every connection — all green. Senior Engineer Maya Chen leaned back in her chair, savoring the rare moment of calm in the operations center.

It started with a flicker. A single service, deep in the dependency graph, reported a brief timeout. Maya barely noticed — timeouts happened. The system was designed to be resilient.

But this timeout was different. It cascaded.

In the span of 47 seconds, what began as a null pointer exception in the user-service authentication module rippled outward like fire through dry brush. The cache layer, trusting the corrupted response, propagated invalid session tokens to every connected service.

Maya watched in horror as the green lights turned amber, then red, then dark. Twelve thousand requests per second, all failing. The auto-scaling algorithms, designed to add capacity under load, instead spun up instances that immediately crashed, each one a new source of corrupted data.

The city of microservices — carefully architected over three years — burned in under four minutes.

'Every decision changes everything,' the architect had said when they designed the system. Maya understood now. A single missing null check. A single assumption. A single moment of oversight.

In the grimoire, this incident would be recorded as 'The Conflagration of '24.' But for Maya, it would always be the day she learned that in distributed systems, there is no such thing as a small mistake.