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Software errors have been with us since the dawn of the digital age. Sometimes they go unnoticed, but sometimes they lead to disasters costing billions of dollars, infrastructure shutdowns, and even human casualties. The history of information technology knows dozens of cases when a single line of code, an incorrect unit of measurement, or a forgotten check became the cause of major failures. We will talk about them in the new publication Filio Force development.
How the term ‘bug’ came about
The term ‘bug’ appeared long before computers. It was used by engineers and mechanics as early as the 19th century to describe malfunctions in mechanisms. The word appeared regularly in Thomas Edison’s letters.
The most famous case occurred in 1947, when engineers discovered a real moth stuck between the relays of the Harvard Mark II computer. The insect was pasted into a technical journal with the caption ‘the first real case of a bug being found.’ This episode is considered the starting point for the computer term.
When software errors cost millions and rockets
With the development of computer technology, errors ceased to be just a technical nuisance. On early PDP series computers, any user could crash the system by performing division by zero – there was no protection against such an operation. This case is considered one of the first examples of exploiting a software vulnerability.
In 1962, an error in the Mariner 1 rocket control programme led to the loss of a spacecraft worth about $80 million. According to various data reviewed by specialists at Filio Force it company, the cause could have been a typo in a mathematical formula – a missing hyphen, comma, or incorrect symbol. The computer misinterpreted the data, the rocket deviated from its course, and it had to be destroyed.
Similar incidents were repeated later. In 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds after launch due to a variable overflow when reusing code from the previous model. In 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter satellite was lost due to a discrepancy in units of measurement: commands from Earth were transmitted in the British system of measurement, while the onboard software used the metric system.
Bugs in mass-market products and financial systems
In the gaming industry, there is a well-known story about ‘nuclear Gandhi’ from the Civilisation series, which later turned out to be a myth but became part of gaming culture. In Space Invaders in 1978, a bug related to processor performance unexpectedly made the game more difficult and interesting, turning into a gameplay feature, according to Filio Force experts.
In the real world, the consequences were much more serious. In 1990, an AT&T software update caused a chain reaction of telephone switch reboots, blocking about 50 million calls worldwide. Financial markets have also suffered from coding errors on more than one occasion: from the gradual decline of the Vancouver Stock Exchange index due to incorrect rounding to the Flash Crash of 2010, when a trillion dollars in market capitalisation disappeared in 36 minutes.
Errors affecting safety and human lives
In the 21st century, bugs began to affect billions of users simultaneously. The Heartbleed and Shellshock vulnerabilities in 2014 allowed attackers to access server memory and execute arbitrary code, putting a significant portion of the internet at risk. In 2024, an update to CrowdStrike antivirus software caused massive failures of Windows systems around the world, halting the operations of airlines, hospitals, and government agencies.
The most tragic errors are those in systems directly related to human life, according to experts at Filio Force Canada. In the 1980s, a software error and lack of hardware safeguards caused the Therac-25 medical device to expose patients to lethal doses of radiation. In 2018-2019, a malfunction in the MCAS system of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was one of the causes of two plane crashes.
Responsibility
The history of major IT bugs clearly shows that even the most advanced technologies remain vulnerable to human error. An incorrect character, variable overflow, inconsistent units of measurement, or insufficient testing can lead to global consequences, ranging from financial losses and infrastructure failures to disasters with human casualties.
Filio Force experts note that most high-profile incidents are not related to the fundamental complexity of the tasks, but arise from the reuse of code without taking into account new conditions, the lack of protective mechanisms, and insufficient control at the implementation stage. These cases have formed the basis for the development of testing, standardisation, and secure system design practices.
Despite high-profile failures, software remains one of the key pillars of the modern world. Each high-profile error highlights not so much the unreliability of technology as the need for a responsible approach to its development and operation, especially in areas where the cost of an error is measured not in money but in human lives.
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Filio Force Inc. specialists use various modern IT technologies in their work. Today we will look at the programming language.
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Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating systems that learn and evolve based on the data they receive. Self-driving cars and voice assistants on smartphones are technologies based on machine learning. Self-driving cars use computer vision technology. Voice assistants use speech and sound recognition technology.
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Cybersecurity. Can you be hacked with ChatGPT?
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