List of software bugs

Program errors can be of different styles, have a variety of causes and draw highly different impacts. The list of bugs shows some examples medial looked at examples of program errors, is classified by sectors ( user groups) and describes their consequences.

Aerospace

• When F-16 fighter aircraft, the autopilot brought the plane in the supine position when the equator was overflown. This was because they had not considered a "negative" of latitude as input data. This error was discovered very late in the development of the F -16 based on a simulator and eliminated.
• On 4 June 1996 the prototype of the Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency for one minute blasted into four kilometers altitude after launch. The program code for the control was taken over by the Ariane 4 and works only in one of the Ariane 4 can not be exceeded area (acceleration level ). The control systems were disrupted, was exceeded as this same area of the Ariane 5, which accelerated more than the Ariane 4 When programming, there had been an error in a cast, its occurrence through the used programming language Ada actually had discovered and treated can. However, this safety functionality left off those responsible. The damage amounted to about 370 million U.S. dollars.
• 1999 missed the NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter the landing on Mars, because the programmers used the wrong measuring system. NASA lost by the probe.
• On October 8, 2005, in the Russian Plesetsk a program error for a false start launcher and the loss of CryoSat.

Medicine

• Between 1985 and 1987 there were several accidents with the medical irradiation apparatus Therac - 25th As a result of an overdose caused by incorrect programming and lack of safety measures, organs had to be removed, three patients died because of overdose.

Traffic

• On March 12, 1995 was due to a few bytes to small-sized stack in the software of a hamburger signal box, in which also the replacement system was shut down for safety reasons, to massive delays in the nationwide rail traffic. On 16 December 2009 there was a similar error in the interlocking of the main station Hannover.
• The USS Yorktown, a largely computerized ship of the Ticonderoga - class operation, according to the Navy during a maneuver in September 1997, just under three hours helpless in the Mediterranean after an engineer for testing purposes - 0.0 KNOTS had ( minus 0.0 knots) entered. Since the input has not been checked for valid values, this resulted in an overflow in the database of the Windows NT system. Then was the computer network consisting of multiple Windows NT servers, collapsed and it took over three hours to resuscitate the server.
• With Toll Collect it came in 2003 partly because of the lack of compatibility of software modules to drastic delays with penalties and loss of revenue in the billions.

Finance

• Beginning of November 2005 could be operated for hours on the Tokyo Stock Exchange due to a system error, not a trade. In the following weeks, there were many faulty securities orders; in one case was even a financial loss of over $ 300 million. The President of the Stock Exchange, Takuo Tsurushima, then resigned from his post.
• In August 2012, the company Knight Capital lost within 45 minutes, more than 440 million U.S. dollars ( 359 million euros ) due to an error in their stock trading software. A new trading program flooded the market with defective trade orders and amassed a mountain too expensive purchased shares. The following rescue of the company by investors cost the original owners 70 to 75 percent of its shares in the company.
• In October and November 2012, there was due to difficulties in migrating to a new core banking system in the online banking systems of the Bank Austria to massive problems. The system was one more day can not be reached after the 2-day transition period, had to be restarted several times and was even days after the change is partially unreachable, often overloaded and thereby slow. ATMs did not work, transfers were performed incorrectly and the new user interface has been criticized as too confusing and complicated. In addition to the assurance to assume any collection fees offered by Bank Austria and its online banking customers BusinessNet vouchers of 30 € to, in sum, ie € 21 million

Communication

• 2007, there was in Austria in the transition to digital satellite television to problems in around 30,000 households, because software in the digital receiver was faulty.
• On the night of 29 October 30, 2007, there was at Deutsche Telekom to nationwide outages and faulty connections for voice services in the communication system, because an updated server software was faulty. The system could be made ​​to run only after several hours by installing the old software again.

• In October 2007, ten members of the South African army came through a fully automated 35-mm anti-aircraft gun killed. The cause of a defective computer system has been suggested

Information Technology

• The so-called box model bug in Internet Explorer ensured that many Web designers had to write special instructions for this browser, as the program interpreted dimensions of web page elements wrong. The error no longer occurs with current versions of Internet Explorer.

Error in annual change

• Before the turn of the year 1999/2000, the Year 2000 problem was a topic for IT because standing in use computer applications yearly data for the year 2000 and later were able to (mostly due to only 2 -digit storage) do not process correctly or because the ability was not known and must be checked. The faulty actions were long years back, developers and users known in principle, but the error occurred ( in the processing of annual data from 1900 to 1999 ) is not evident. This became a worldwide " so far the most momentous and most expensive (human) error in handling ( High Tech) computer systems ", which led almost all IT users to projects, according to various estimates total " up to 800 billion U.S. dollar of expenditure " caused, to a large extent merely to review the year 2000 compliance, if necessary for their preparation. Nevertheless, the occurrence of errors could not always be prevented:

• At the Berlin fire brigade there was New Year's Eve chaotic states.
• In dialysis equipment by Gambro automatic disinfection no longer worked.
• There was a malfunction in nuclear power plants worldwide.
• U.S. spy satellites were out of service for a few hours.

• At the beginning of 2010 were due to the misinterpretation of the year " 2010" in the EMC security chip many bank customers for days not withdraw money at ATMs.