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11 of the most costly software errors in history

Nick Harley on December 10, 2018

In this post, we take a look at some of the biggest disasters over the years to see what happens when software errors cause chaos! NASA's...
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Phil Ashby

Thanks Nick, good to be reminded that we can all make bigger mistakes! Possibly my favourite expensive 'bug' to date, creating null references :)

infoq.com/presentations/Null-Refer...

Your link for the Ariane 5 flight 501 failure seems broken, this MIT write up is pretty official:

sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/Ariane5...

which notes that engineers didn't need to 'hit the self destruct', as flight 501 broke up and self-destructed autonomously, after a series of failures induced by gaps in testing and communication between CNES and industry suppliers.. big project teams eh?

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Nick Harley

Thanks Phil. I updated the broken link and also added your MIT link, thanks for providing that :)

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Harry Dennen

"There are two SRIs operating in parallel, with identical hardware and software." Identical hardware and software...

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Lennart

Another one would be Therac-25 radiotherapy machine, the paper is also a fascinating read: sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

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kurisutofu

Good read!

Now, we can understand a little better why sometimes the higher-ups are reluctant to update a system.