Software Bugs causing Catastrophic Disaster

How software bugs can lead to national catastrophic disasters?

 its all about overflow errors, wrong conversions or syntax,division by ZERO, rounding errors – does this sound unfamiliar????

Explosion of Ariane 5, 1996 due to “…conversion of a 64 bit integer into a 16 bit signed integer lead to an overflow…”

Loss of Mars Climate Orbiter, 1999 due to “…mix-up between pounds and kilogram….”

Mars Polar Lander, 1998 due to “…software error that mistakenly identified the vibration caused by the deployment of the lander’s legs as being caused by the vehicle touching down on the Martian surface….”

Loss of Mariner 1, 1962 due to “..period instead of comma in FORTRAN DO-Loop…”

Breakdown of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network, 1990 due to “…a single line of buggy code in a complex software upgrade implemented to speed up calling caused a ripple effect that shut down the network.

USS Yorktown dead in the water, 1998 due to “….input and Division by ‘0’. „ X / 0 = undefined…”

MIM-104 Patriot Missile Failure, 1991 due to “…rounding error”

Shutdown of 5 nuclear reactors, 1985 due to “..use of arithmetic sum of variables instead of the square root of the sum of the squares of the variables….”

Denver International Airport, 1994 due to “…baggage handling system broke down because of numerous bugs….”

Top 10 worst IT disasters of all time (some of the above cases actually figure in this top 10 list)

1. Faulty Soviet early warning system nearly causes WWIII (1983)
2. The AT&T network collapse (1990)
3. The explosion of the Ariane 5 (1996)
4. Airbus A380 suffers from incompatible software issues (2006)
5. Mars Climate Observer metric problem (1998)
6. EDS and the Child Support Agency (2004)
7. The two-digit year-2000 problem (1999/2000)
8. When the laptops exploded (2006)
9. Siemens and the passport system (1999)
10. LA Airport flights grounded (2007)

What about in India???

The Big software companies in India do experience software bugs and the disaster level is also high but there is no significant leakage of these disasters...

Questions to readers: Are u aware of any software bugs disaster in India?? if so do comment and i'l compile a detailed report about it :)

Posted in: