Saturday, April 22, 2023

The Most Famous Software Failures of All Time

 1. Memory Failure - Tesla Recalls 135,000 Vehicles
  •  Tesla will recall a maximum of 135,000 cars to fix computer memory issues in the touchscreen that could cause a loss of some features notified the electric car manufacturer to the U.S NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).
  •  The manufacturer said that the touchscreen’s flash memory reached the end of its lifespan. It can trigger failures of the software components of the centre monitor and can unintentionally lead to the loss of external turn signal lighting, rearview camera display, and defog/defrost control settings.
2. HSBC’s Significant IT Outages
  • One of the famous software failure examples. HSBC experienced a big IT outage in January 2016 and millions of bank customers were unable to access online accounts. The bank took almost two days to recover and get back to normal service. The Chief Operating Officer of HSBC (COO) claimed that this was the result of a ‘unique technological problem’ within internal systems.
3. Prison Break
  •  An error that happened in December 2015 resulted in more than 3,200 US prisoners being released before their announced date of release. The software was developed to track the actions of prisoners and was released in 2002. The problem has been around for about 13 years and an average inmate has been released almost 49 days in advance.
4. The Explosion of the Ariane 5
  •  On June 4, 1996, an Ariane 5 rocket launched by the ESA (European Space Agency) exploded just forty seconds after its launch from Kourou in French Guiana. The rocket was on its inaugural voyage, after a decade of development costing $8 billion and the result of this bug was the loss of $370 million.
  •  The reason behind its failure was an integer Overflow, which is a widespread bug in computer programming. In this case, an attempt was made to set a 64-bit number in 16-bit space.
5. PayPal accidentally credits man $92 quadrillion
  •  When Chris Reynolds opened his PayPal e-mail statement, the Pennsylvania PR executive’s account balance was $92,233,720,368,547,800.
  •  The amount is significant in the world of 64-bit numbers suggesting a programming error. The error was quickly recognized, and his account had returned to zero by the time he logged in.
  •  PayPal offered to give an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds’ choice.
6. Windows Calculator Bug
  •  This bug exists in most Windows versions(except in Windows 10), including Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows 8. You can check it in your OS if you have one of these versions.
  •  Steps: Open Windows Calculator, type 4 and take the square root, you will get two then subtract two from it. Instead of the result from zero, you will see different outputs on different versions of Windows.
  •  The cause for the bug is the way calculator manages sqrt operations. The results are saved as floating-point numbers instead of integers, and the precision errors when it comes to floating-point calculations are the result that you can see.
  •  Microsoft acknowledged this bug in the calculator app, and they fixed it in Windows 10 Build 17639.
7. Gangnam Style music video ‘broke’ YouTube
  •  YouTube’s counter before used a 32-bit integer, which is a unit used to represent data in computer architecture. This 32-bit integer determines the maximum number of possible views it can count was 2,147,483,647.
  •  The Gangnam Style video exceeded the maximum value, and we got the below famous Gangnam Style YouTube bug.
  •  Nowadays, YouTube uses a 64-bit integer for its video counter, which means videos have a maximum viewer count of 9.22 quintillion.

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