Related is William Gibson's idea of "the Jackpot", or a "multicausal appocalypse", where a large catastrophe is caused not by a single major factor but by several smaller ones accumulating and interacting over time. Gibson talks about it in https://vimeo.com/116132074.

If this is the kind of thing you find interesting, you should also read How Complex Systems Fail (http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...).