Programming errors in software, so-called bugs have caused huge damage over time, the loss of lives in military applications or millions and billions of dollars on stock exchanges or in space exploration missions, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
Knight Capital Group, one of the largest brokerage houses in New York, is struggling to survive in these days after a programming error caused Wednesday a loss of $440 million, about four times company’s profit last year. Knight’s computers “have gone bad” for a few minutes, flooding the New York Stock Exchange with trades that caused violent fluctuations in prices of many stocks.
In 1991 a U.S. missile defense system located in Saudi Arabia failed, because of a software bug, to detect a Scud missile attack on barracks. The attack resulted in 28 deaths among American soldiers. The error was fixed by Army experts, but the new version of software came to the military base one day too late.
Y2K panic of the late ’90s has generated worldwide in the period 1995-2001, expenditures of $296.7 billion, according to research firm IDC. Only in the United States, companies have spent about $100 billion in preparation for Y2K, according to the Department of Commerce in Washington. Y2K bug would have to happen on January 1, 2000, at 00:00, by computer chaos caused by the transition from 1999 to 2000. According to the theories in place at that time, computers would have returned to a date in the past because 2000 was not programmed in the software.
The panic around Y2K has caused many people, especially in rich countries, heavily dependent on computer networks, to stock on water supplies, canned food, flashlights, fuel and other necessities in case of the end of the world. Concerned, people expected a general economic collapse and planes falling from the sky. End of the world never came, computers had no problems switching to the new year.
In 1999, NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter, a sophisticated spacecraft designed to orbit Mars and transmit relevant data to scientists. Equipment was lost in space, and the $655 million mission failed because of a software bug: one of the teams involved in the project was using software that calculated distances in imperial units such as inches and feet, while another team worked in the metric system: meter, kilometer, etc. Discrepancies have led to the erroneous calculation of the spacecraft’s route.
Intel, the world’s largest maker of processors, spent $475 million in 1994, after it revealed that a number of Pentium processors, very popular at that time, were affected by a programming error. Unhappy customers have requested the replacement of the defective product.
In 1988, a program developed by a student at Cornell, one of the most prestigious universities in the United States became the first worm that was spreading on the Internet, due to a programming error. Starting with the intention of an innocent experiment, student Robert Tappan Morris was convicted of computer crimes and fined of $10,000. His lawyer argued that this story led to a leap in information security. Virus removal costs were estimated at $100 million. Morris is now a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of Y Combinator, a venture capital fund specializing in promoting new projects in IT.
In 1962, at the beginning of space exploration, the Mariner ship, designed to pass through near the Venus planet, was commissioned to self-destruct in less than five minutes after launch, due to a programming error that caused a strong deviation from the route. Research has revealed that programmers missed a hyphen in the shuttle software, causing incorrect calculations. The failed mission cost was over $18 million, a huge amount at that time.
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