45 Times Computers Glitched And Failed In The Weirdest Ways

From smartphones to smart homes, coding revolutionized the way we live, work, and connect with the world around us. What stands behind a good program is the development process.

It is usually a multi-nuanced one, but looks something like this: Selecting the methodology or the roadmap of the project, gathering the requirements needed, deciding how the software will operate, building the model, and constructing the code. Then comes the primary testing phase, which then leads to the fixing of any and all defects that come up. Once all that is done, the software is deployed and further upgraded following user demands. From that point on the software is maintained to sustain the highest quality.

Programming failure sounds funny enough, but what stands behind it? Surprisingly, 75% of developers feel that new software projects will fail in the initial stage. A report by Standish Group states that 49% of new cases fail, with 47% of them being challenged and only 4% successful. After all, who stands behind the screen is just a human: “To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” – Paul Ehrlich.

Surely, you’ve seen funny software fails on Reddit, but here we have some of the most famous and costly software disasters of all time. 

Burning Mars Climate Orbiter. In 1998, NASA launched a $125 million robotic space probe to monitor the Martian atmosphere, climate, and surface. After 286 days, it went into orbital insertion, and communication with the spacecraft was lost. The navigation pushed the orbiter too close to the Mars atmosphere where it burned and broke into pieces. 

Another software fail happened when hundreds of cancer patients got exposed to massive radiation doses. Since 2000, many hospitals across the USA used the Therac-25 medical radiation therapy device to treat people suffering from cancer. However, due to the incorrect input of radiation dosage data into the software, patients received radiation doses up to 100 times higher than the intended amount. Tragically, this error led to the loss of 10 lives and caused severe injuries to more than 20 people.

World War III almost happened because of a software fail. As frightening as it sounds, in 1983, the Soviets believed that American missiles were attacking them. Their systems misinterpreted sunlight reflections off the tops of clouds as missile launches. Fortunately, later an officer of the Soviet Air Defense Forces identified the error and proclaimed it a false alarm.  

Even buildings collapse because of software failures. In 1978, Hartford Civic Center Coliseum crumbled from the weight of snow, costing $70 million + $20 million in damage to the local economy. The CAD programmer made a mistake in the design of the coliseum by incorrectly assuming that the roof supports would only experience pure compression. Additionally, the computer model indicated that all the top chords received lateral bracing, but only the interior frame met the criteria.

As we gaze into the future, a few upcoming trends are likely to happen in software development. 

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic for some time now. We can expect it to be more common in software development, like creating better applications and helping with data analysis and forecasting.

Another interesting future trend will be the 'Internet of things'. This basically means a network of 'things' - connecting everything by exchanging sensor data between them. Examples could be: smartphones, cars, household appliances, and industrial machinery. 

Finally, Virtual reality. It is already being used in gaming, education, and entertainment. In the future, we can also expect this technology to become more common in software development. It will help simulate environments and test products in real time.

As amusing as r/softwaregore is, the subreddit serves as a reminder of all the challenges developers face, and if anything, it makes us appreciate them even more. Software is both: or friend and an enemy, the coding just decide us think which is which.

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