Los Angles International Airport – 20,000 Airline
Passengers Grounded
Los Angles International Airport –
20,000 Airline Passengers Grounded
In 2007, a single network card in a single
computer with a faulty piece of software on it brought the entire air
transportation system down on the west coast of America.
The data sent by the card causes the entire
airport network to fail, and it took eight hours to identify the problem and
correct it. During that time, no aircraft could land or take off, and around
20,000 passengers couldn’t embark.
EDS – Missing Child Support And $1.5bn
The system that EDS created for the CSA
was a low point in software development.
The government in this country has a
lamentable track record in the procurement and implementation of IT systems.
But even by their low standards, the system that EDS (Electronic Data Systems)
created for the CSA (Child Support Agency) was a low point in software
development.
Some blame must go to the Department for
Work and Pensions, which decided to entirely restructure its operations at the
same point as EDS decided to roll out its new CSA system. As a result, the
interactions between these two departments no longer worked, as their systems
became entirely incompatible.
The CSA system was worst affected, having
at one point some 500 documented bugs, and many more undocumented. It ended up
allowing the CSA to overpay 1.9 million people, while underpaying a further
700,000 and having more than $7.5 billion in uncollected child support
payments. As government departments go, the CSA had the highest number of
public complaints for a number of years running.
It’s since been admitted that the CSA spent
$1.5 for every $2.75 that is managed to get paid in spousal support, while
running a backlog that reached more than 240,000 cases at one point.
A divorced friend recounted to me how while
he was talking to a CSA case worker on the phone, she told him categorically
not to tell her if he patched up his marriage, because placing that information
in the system that would mean that his records would be entirely inaccessible,
possibly forever.
Soviet Gas Pipeline – A Big Bang
The problem about Soviet Gas Pipeline in
1982
This wasn’t exactly a bug; it was a fully
intentional software failure, but it’s still worth a mention. Back in 1982, the
US didn’t want its latest computer hardware going to the Soviet Union, and
banned the direct or indirect supplying of it to them. The Russians, thinking
they’d been clever, ordered a system from a Canadian company for controlling
the trans-Siberian gas pipeline, but the CIA was one step ahead of them.
Instead of blocking the deal the Americans
had the Canadian company provide the system, with an additional piece of code
that would cause fault once the system went fully operational, but not before.
It’s been widely reported that the result
was the largest peacetime explosion that wasn’t a nuclear test, although the
Russians are strangely coy about discussing what actually transpired.
Ariane 5 Flight 510 - $8.5bn And
Counting
‘That dream ended just 37 seconds later when
the rocket exploded.’
You’d think that the European space agency
might have learned a few lessons from Nasa’s most unfortunate experiences, but
apparently not.
In 1996, on the brink of offering a large
payload space transportation service, ESA launched the massive Ariane 5 from
its facility in French Guiana. That dream ended just 37 seconds later when the
rocket exploded, taking a $750 million satellite payload with it.
The cause of this fiasco was a software bug
that tried to push a 64-bit block of data into a 16-bit address, crashing the
engine control software module. The backup software system kicked in, written
with an identical bug, crashed and 0.05 seconds later the engineers where
commanded to deliver in excess of 100% power and shortly thereafter Ariane 5
Flight 501 was a billion tiny pieces of scrap metal floating down over the
Atlantic Ocean.
The European Space Agency demonstrates
its own big bang theory with the $85bn Ariane 5
The cost of developing the vehicle was
$8bn, although they did eventually get one that wasn’t just a big firework, on
the third attempt. Interestingly enough, the software problem was present in
the previous Ariane 4, but due to the lower power output of its engines the
code there never ran into the overflow issue that doomed its successor.
