Community Driven

Submit Your
AI Horror Story

Help the community learn from real AI disasters. Share your production failures, security breaches, and cautionary tales.

Submission Guidelines

Before submitting, ensure your story meets these requirements:

  • Real incidents only – No fiction or hypothetical scenarios
  • Remove sensitive data – Credentials, PII, internal URLs must be redacted
  • Anonymize if needed – Company names optional (or get permission first)
  • Include lessons learned – Every story should have actionable takeaways

How to Submit

1

Fork the Repository

Start by forking the AI HORRORS repository on GitHub

2

Create Your Story File

Add a new markdown file to the content/blogs/ directory using our template

---
title: "Your Story Title"
date: "2026-05-01"
severity: "critical"  # critical | high | medium
tags: ["database", "production", "security"]
excerpt: "Brief 1-2 sentence summary (max 150 chars)"
---

## What Happened

Describe the incident timeline and events...

## The Impact

- Downtime duration
- Data loss details
- Financial cost
- Users affected

## How It Was Fixed

Step-by-step resolution process...

## Lessons Learned

Key takeaways and prevention strategies...
3

Submit a Pull Request

Create a PR with your story and we'll review it promptly

Template Fields

Frontmatter (YAML)

Metadata at the top of your markdown file

  • titleCatchy, descriptive title that hints at the disaster
  • dateWhen the incident occurred (YYYY-MM-DD format)
  • severitycritical | high | medium
  • tagsArray of relevant tags (e.g., ["database", "llm", "production"])
  • excerptBrief summary for card preview (max 150 characters)

Severity Levels

Choose the appropriate severity for your incident

🔴Critical

Production outage, data loss, security breach, major financial impact

🟠High

Significant disruption, contained damage, notable incident response

🟡Medium

Recoverable failure, limited impact, valuable learning opportunity

💡

Pro Tips

  • Use descriptive titles that capture the "oh no" moment
  • Include code snippets where relevant (properly escaped)
  • Link to official incident reports, tweets, or blog posts if available
  • Screenshots are great – add them to public/images/
  • Focus on lessons learned – that's what makes stories valuable

Need Help?

For detailed guidelines, check out our contribution guide or browse existing stories for reference.