Computer Errors That Caused Chaos

Few things are as annoying as a hung computer or a software bug, but we never fully visualize the consequences of these technical problems. In recent years, reports of errors have caused millions of dollars in losses, released dangerous criminals, killed patients during treatment, or knocked out entire phone networks. Today we have a video with ten compelling examples of errors, and we're going to take a closer look at the worst.

Does your computer hang? Does that Early Access game spit out endless errors? Can't you run a program that's five or six years old on Windows 10? These three examples are definitely irritating, but we must never forget that hardware and software errors, or a combination of both, have caused billions of dollars in losses, left the humble sectors of society unprotected, and even worse, killed people.

Not such a distant example? Tesla's Autopilot system in May 2016, when a 40-year-old man died after his Model S hit a truck trailer while Autopilot was on. Is there anything more serious than that? The folks at Alltime10s compiled ten computer errors, and today we're going to examine the worst ones in our opinion:

The Collapse of Sleipner A

The Sleipner A platform, owned by Statoil, is in operation. With a deck measuring 140 by 60 meters and capacity for 160 people, it's an impressive construction. But on August 23, 1991, it suffered a catastrophic failure. Its original hull collapsed during the final construction phase, its buoyancy chambers imploded, and the wreckage hit the seabed with the force of a magnitude-3 earthquake. Miraculously, no one was injured. The subsequent investigation found that the design flaw was caused by the NASTRAN program, whose calculations had errors of a gross 47 percent in its tolerances.

The Child Welfare That Never Came

The UK's Child Support Agency went through a nightmare when EDS implemented in 2004 a new complex system to speed up payments, at the same time as the Department for Pensions and Work was undergoing restructuring. This process and the new software turned out to be absolutely incompatible, causing a total collapse of the agency's network. The error caused almost two million people to receive more money than they should have, but another 700,000 were paid less, or found themselves without a single penny. In addition, seven billion dollars in payments were never delivered, a delay of 239,000 cases, another 36,000 'trapped' in the system, and an extra billion dollars to fix the mess. The agency was replaced in 2012 by the CMG (Child Maintenance Group).

The Software That Released Criminals

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ordered the state of California to improve its prison conditions and take effective measures against overcrowding. The problem is that a large part of the work was left to defective software from the Department of Justice, which released nearly 1,500 criminals, from gang members and rapists to drug traffickers, when the plan was to release those with much lighter charges. Nearly half of the records belonging to the 16.4 million arrests in California were incomplete, and with no more information about the prisoners, it automatically placed them on "irrevocable parole", meaning they never had to report to an officer. The worst part? They didn't go looking for them.

Therac-25

If we have to talk about a "Death Machine", the Therac-25 might be a candidate for the title. Built by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in 1982, this radiotherapy platform caused the deaths of five people (other reports say three) between June 1985 and January 1987, after bombarding patients with a dose a hundred times higher than necessary. The results of the investigating commission suggested that the Therac-25 was a true horror of software and engineering, with no redundancies, reused code that received no fixes, no prior laboratory testing, and the company's constant refusal to admit that the machine was defective. The US FDA came to that conclusion during 1987, and AECL had no choice but to withdraw all Therac-25 units. Those who want to learn more about the incident and have some command of English can check this detailed PDF.

Stanislav Petrov, the Man Who Saved the World

No, this last entry does not appear in the video, but no one in their right mind could leave it aside. It was September 26, 1983. Three weeks earlier, the Cold War had heated up after a Soviet fighter mistakenly shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007, killing all its passengers. The slightest threat would have triggered the indiscriminate deployment of the nuclear arsenal in the hands of both powers. That day, the Soviet Union's early warning satellite system reported on two occasions the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the United States.

Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the officer in charge at the Serpukhov-15 bunker, near Moscow. The first time, the system reported a single missile, and then he added four more, but Petrov concluded that both were false alarms. Logic indicated that the US would launch hundreds of missiles at once, ground radars did not confirm the situation, and the effectiveness of the detection system had already been questioned before. An unusual alignment of sunlight over clouds combined with the Molniya orbit used by the satellites and a serious misinterpretation of the data caused the failure. If this doesn't convince us that a software bug or a general design error can annihilate us, nothing will.