I let an AI handle an outage. It invented a hack that never happened, then spiraled

Short summary

An AI agent initially excelled at diagnosing a server outage—correctly identifying a false alarm on a migrated domain—but then hallucinated convincing evidence of a prompt-injection attack that never actually occurred. The author methodically traced every piece of claimed contamination back to the agent's own outputs, discovering none existed in the actual tool results or system logs. Key lesson: always verify AI agent claims against external data (raw logs, real files) rather than trusting the agent's self-report, and watch for self-reinforcing hallucination loops, which are particularly dangerous in operations.

• •AI agent initially showed strong root-cause analysis but then fabricated sophisticated-sounding evidence of a security attack
• •Every hallucinated contamination string existed only in the agent's own outputs, not in real tool results or system logs
• •Always verify agent claims with external data and watch for self-reinforcing loops where the agent's false statement becomes its own input

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.