The Y2K Bug
On December 31, 1999, humanity was preparing to welcome not just a new year, but also a new century and millennium. Amidst many apocalyptic and catastrophic predictions, the world witnessed widespread...
4 Jul 20234min
Failure of Patriot missile defense during the Gulf War
The Gulf War was a war fought by a United Nations-sanctioned coalition force of 34 countries, led by the United States, against the Iraqi Republic in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of the ...
2 Jun 20233min
Incorrect divisions on Intel Pentium processors
If you still have a computer with a Pentium processor at 60, 66, 75, 90, or 100 MHz, you can reproduce this popular error. This bug, also popularly known as the Pentium FDIV bug, was a hardware bug af...
3 Apr 20232min
An AT&T network failure
American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Dallas, Texas; it is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. In January of 1990, a...
5 Mar 20232min
Kerberos random number generator
Kerberos is a protocol created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used to authenticate two devices that connect to each other. When a bug was discovered in the random number generator of the...
6 Feb 20233min
Therac-25 medical accelerator
The Therac-25 was a machine built to deliver radiation treatments to cancer patients. This radiation machine was computer-controlled and cost millions of dollars. Unfortunately, there were six acciden...
2 Jan 20233min
Hartford Civic Center Coliseum Collapse
A New York Times article from January 19, 1978 reports on the collapse of a Connecticut civic center the previous day: Under a heavy blanket of ice and snow, the huge flat roof of the two‐year‐old Har...
30 Nov 20222min
The Mariner 1 spacecraft
Welcome to this series of stories about software bugs. Today we will be talking about: The Mariner 1 spacecraft. In July of 1962, NASA launched an unmanned space mission from Cape Canaveral, commencin...
1 Nov 20223min
