Software bugs are not only annoying, but can be expensive and fatal too. Many companies and nations have ended up paying billions of dollars in repairs, lawsuits and lost sales due to these coding errors. Some of these errors were very minute.
Let’s take a look at some of the costliest and most dramatic malfunctions over the past 50 years.
1. Hyphen Havoc
On a Venus fly by mission in 1962, The Mariner 1 spacecraft hardly reached Cape Canaveral when a software-coding error caused the rocket to go off-course, threatening to crash back to earth. A self-destruct command was given less than 5 minutes after takeoff by the NASA engineers. Later it was found that the havoc was caused due to omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions, which transmitted incorrect signals to the spacecraft. The cost for the rocket was more than $18 million at the time.
2. Worm Goes Wild
Robert Tappan Morris developed a program in 1988 when he was a student at Cornell University. What he believed as a harmless experiment spread wildly, crashing thousands of computers because of a coding error. It was the first widespread worm attack. Morris, who now is the co-founder of the startup incubator Y Combinatorand a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was convicted of criminal hacking and fined $10,000. His lawyer claimed at the trial that his client's program helped improve computer security. Costs for cleaning up the mess may have gone as high as $100 million.
3. Patriot's Fatal Error
In February of 1991, a U.S. Patriot missiledefense system in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, failed to detect an attack on an Army barracks. This was caused because of a software problem which led the system to inaccurately track calculation. This problem grew when the operated for long. On the day of the incident, the system had been operating for more than 100 hours, and the inaccuracy was serious enough to cause the system to look in the wrong place. This resulted in the loss of lives of 28 American soldiers.
4. Intel's Miscalculation
A math professor in 1994 discovered and publicized a flaw in Intel's popular Pentium processor. The company claimed that the calculating error caused by the flaw would happen so rarely that the vast majority of users wouldn't notice and so it was announced that Intel will replace chips upon request to users who could prove they were affected.
But the angry customers demanded a replacement for anyone who asked and Intel had to agree. This cost Intel $475 million.
5. Mars, We've Had a Problem
In 1999 NASA engineers lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter as they attempted to place it in Mars's orbit for research. The cause was that one team was using a program that calculated distance in English units such as inches, feet and pounds, while another team used metric units. This error led to faulty measurements of the spacecraft's trajectory and the sudden death of an operation that cost more than $655 million.
6. Getting Clocked by Y2K
At the onset of the new millennium, the Y2K bug was expected to cripple computers at midnight on January 1, 2000 because internal clocks did not have the year 2000 programmed in. Developed nations believed that systems would revert to an earlier year, such as 1900, computers would fail, and some people feared that planes would fall out of the sky. People even stocked up water and rations to prepare for the end of the world.
This never happened but $296.7 billion was spent worldwide from 1995 to 2001 to mitigate the damage. U.S. businesses and public agencies spent about $100 billion alone in preparation for Y2K.
7. Does Not Compute
A coding error in Axa Rosenberg Group’s investment model cost its clients $217 million in losses. The firm agreed to pay $242 million to resolve claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Axa's co-founder, Barr M. Rosenberg, also agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle claims with the SEC, which accused him of securities fraud in 2009.
8. Bad Brake for Toyota
In 2010, Toyota recalled more than 400,000 of its hybrid vehicles. It was not because of a mechanical issue but the cars had a software glitch, which would cause a lag in the anti-lock-brake system. Class-action lawsuits resulting from those recalls, including the software glitch, were estimated to cost Toyota as much as $3 billion, according to Associated Press.
9. Knight's $440 Million Malfunction
Knight Capital Group, one of the biggest American market makers for stocks, is struggling to stay afloat following a software bug that cost a $440 million loss, an amount that's almost four times what it earned last year. The firm's shares lost 75 percent in two days after the faulty software caused unintended trades, sending dozens of stocks into spasms.
Founded in 1995, Knight grew during the late 1990s into one of the biggest traders of technology stocks that led the market.
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