9 Software Disasters that Cost Millions


Bangalore: Software bugs are not only annoying, but can be expensive and fatal too. Many companies and nations have ended up paying billions of dollars in repairs, lawsuits and lost sales due to these coding errors. Some of these errors were very minute.

Let’s take a look at some of the costliest and most dramatic malfunctions over the past 50 years.

1. Hyphen Havoc

On a Venus fly by mission in 1962, The Mariner 1 spacecraft hardly reached Cape Canaveral when a software-coding error caused the rocket to go off-course, threatening to crash back to earth. A self-destruct command was given less than 5 minutes after takeoff by the NASA engineers. Later it was found that the havoc was caused due to omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions, which transmitted incorrect signals to the spacecraft. The cost for the rocket was more than $18 million at the time.