The silent killer of reliability
Software misconfigurations — an overlooked typo in a firewall rule, a storage bucket left open to the internet, an “allow *” IAM policy committed during a late-night deploy — are responsible for some of the most expensive outages and data breaches of the last decade. Yet the lessons learned from each incident are scattered across news articles, tweets, and post-mortems.
Today we’re changing that. ConfigOops is now live: an open, community-curated database that captures, classifies, and contextualizes real-world misconfigurations so engineering and security teams can prevent history from repeating itself.
Why we built ConfigOops
- Institutional memory is fragile. Engineers rotate teams, vendors change settings, and past incidents fade from view. A permanent, vendor-neutral archive keeps the collective memory alive.
- Misconfigurations cut across the stack. From SaaS apps and cloud services to self-hosted databases and Web3 contracts, configuration risk doesn’t stop at your CI/CD pipeline. Teams need a single lens to spot patterns everywhere.
- Every incident is a teachable moment. When a permissions mis-set at a household-name insurer exposes millions of medical records, or a smart-contract flag is toggled the wrong way and freezes on-chain funds, the rest of us should walk away with concrete takeaways, not headlines alone.
Explore incidents like:
- Blue Shield analytics leak – a third-party tag misconfiguration that exposed 4.7 million patient records.
- Alibaba Cloud OSS mis-permissions – a public read/write policy left sensitive objects open for months.
- OVHcloud BGP error – an incorrect route export that took swaths of European traffic offline.
Each entry breaks down what happened, why it mattered, and how it was fixed—in less than a five-minute read.
Key features you’ll love
- Lightning-fast search & rich filters
Narrow results to “S3 bucket · critical · 2024-2025” or “Kubernetes · medium severity” in seconds. - Contribution & credit
Found a new case? Submit the incident, attach links, and earn an author badge once verified. Your attribution lives on every page. - Notifications
Opt in to receive a email notifying you when new misconfiguration incidents occur.
How teams are already using ConfigOops
- DevSecOps leads add links to Jira tickets as training material for post-incident reviews.
- Platform engineers feed the root-cause tags into their policy-as-code rules to create proactive guardrails.
- Security awareness trainers weave real-world examples into onboarding courses to keep threats tangible.
- CISOs & auditors benchmark their org’s incident rate against industry averages surfaced by the database.
Explore ConfigOops today → oops.configu.com
By learning from the costly configuration mistakes of others, we all build more resilient systems. We can’t wait to see what you discover—and contribute—inside ConfigOops.
– The Configu Team
Have feedback or feature requests? Drop us a line at support@configu.com or open an issue on GitHub. Together, we’ll make sure the next big outage is the one that never happens.
