What is a synonym for “perfect storm”?
I am composing a letter to the owner of my company. In the letter I am trying to describe a situation where a problem occurred due to a confluence of failures. E.g., our tom-foolery server crashed, because the backup failed and the widget was faulty and the wickets were rusty and the elbows weren't bent enough. The system wouldn't have crashed, but for this coincidence of these specific failures.
The phrase that first came to mind was "Perfect Storm" which is defined by MacMillan Dictionary as follows:
a very unpleasant situation in which several bad things happen at once
My example sentence
Normally the server can handle a backup failure without crashing, but that was not the case today due to a ________________.
I am worried that Perfect Storm may not be easily understood in this context. I am hoping that I can find a word or phrase that will be understandable and professional.
I searched all of the major dictionary sites for synonyms to Perfect Storm but I couldn't find any at all. Next, I searched Stack Exchange for similar questions. There are a couple of questions here on ELU that are related to the phrase Perfect Storm, but unfortunately none provide a synonym.
I am hopeful that you can help me. Please feel free to reword my example sentence in any way you would like that will provide a professional understandable synonym for "Perfect Storm" in the context outlined above.
What is a synonym for “Perfect Storm”?
You might refer to the situation as a confluence of errors...
: a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point
• a happy confluence of weather and scenery
definition from m-w.com
None of these words have exactly the same meaning as perfect storm, but they might suffice. Debacle and fiasco both mean a complete (and humiliating) failure:
debacle
NOUN
A sudden and ignominious failure; a fiasco.
‘the only man to reach double figures in the second-innings debacle’
(from the Oxford Living Dictionaries)
fiasco
NOUN
A complete failure, especially a ludicrous or humiliating one.
‘his plans turned into a fiasco’
Unless your boss is British, he likely won't understand the word omnishambles and it doesn't really fit, but I just discovered it and quite like it:
omnishambles
NOUN
British
informalA situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.
‘anyone with five minutes to spare, a Maths GCSE, and a calculator could have averted the entire omnishambles by checking the civil servants' sums’
If you want to stress that the issue was caused by a combination of events out of your control (as in, it wasn't your fault), your best bet is probably perfect storm, perhaps followed by a definition:
Normally the server can handle a backup failure without crashing, but that was not the case today due to a perfect storm of multiple unrelated events that conspired to cause the crash.
I believe "comedy of errors" would be understood in the way you intend. It's the title of a play by Shakespeare involving identical twins with identical servants and, well, it's Shakespeare.
"The phrase ‘a comedy of errors’ is often used to describe a situation that is so full of mistakes and problems that it seems funny." Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
One sometimes refers to situations or circumstances as "snowballing" and this has no specific blame component, but clearly implies a relationship in which each failure or issue in a chain compounds the previous issue to become far worse, and whose progress from fine to really not fine is accelerating in an uncontrolled manner.
I've sometimes heard "concatenating circumstances" to cover the unanticipated intersection of multiple low-probability events and failures but without the sense of breakneck accelerating pace.
You can, if intending to anonymously ascribe non-specific blame of mishandling, use either of the US military jargon acronyms "FUBAR" or "SNAFU"... both of which have "polite" versions and "salty" versions - I'll list here the polite: Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition and Situation Normal: All Fouled Up - Fubar typically only implies that a condition has become utterly unfixable and doesn't necessarily ascribe cause, blame or process, whereas Snafu clearly implies "this started off a cakewalk, and has been turned (via mismanagement) into a giant steaming mess".
If being directly crude / soldierly /salty in language is in fact appropriate in your circumstance, you could say "shitstorm" and this turn of phrase, like "perfect storm", can be done in a no-specific-personal-blame-assigned manner to indicate the unanticipated intersection of multiple low-probability events and failures. It is also used frequently to describe a huge ongoing mass of incoming criticism - hence recent use by the current US White House communications team.
In the IT sector in the United States, "black swan" is a specific word used to describe a project which started off seeming reasonable and which has since snowballed out of control, and which, as a project continues to amass ever-increasing levels of complexity, scope creep, new requirements and emergent dependencies now seems destined to suck all available resources without reaching completion in a reasonable time or possibly at all. Use-case: "The special Milspec-compliant PDF viewer for Samsung Watches has become a total black swan project - we need to kill it now."
Hopefully some of this helps.
Here are a few related idioms to consider. Train wreck. Clusterfuck. Comedy of errors. Debacle. Fiasco. Goat rope. Quagmire. This is a professional letter, so I would use quagmire. It would resonate for anyone who read David Halberstam.