10 Unbelievable Facts About Technological Disasters
World 🌍have witnessed lots of disasters in the past. These disasters destroyed thousands of human lives and billions of properties over the past years. Natural disasters like flood, storms, earthquakes, Tsunami cannot be eliminated as each and everyone exists in this planet surrenders to the mother nature. What we can do with our skills and knowledge is to either reduce the effect of it or just ran away from it for a safer place. But on the other hand " Technological Disasters " are man made ones which either happened due to mistakes done by us or intentionally. Root causes for these technological disasters are really surprising due to the fact that how small and negligible the mistakes are. We have picked 10 of those interesting technological disaster and some surprising facts related them for you. Let's get into it ✍
1. AT&T Network Collapse - 1990
In 1990, half of the entire AT&T network crashed. Guess what ? Root cause for this crash is a one line of code in a software patch which they put. Yeah you got it right. Just one liner. Issue started from New York as one of the AT&Ts switching centers started to suffer from minor system problem which led the engineers of that center to shut down the center. This did not do any harm to the network as there are 114 switching centers operating at that time for AT&T. Issue occurred once the engineers starts the shut-ed down switching center. Due to the erroneous line of code, this center starts sending faulty massages to the other centers which caused the up and running systems to trip and reset.
Because of this enormous outage, over 75 million phone calls across US went unanswered. This caused huge losses for large number of businesses including American Airlines which suffer from lost of 200,000 reservations due to this error.
Because of this enormous outage, over 75 million phone calls across US went unanswered. This caused huge losses for large number of businesses including American Airlines which suffer from lost of 200,000 reservations due to this error.
2. Ariane 5 Disaster - 1996
Costing $370M, Ariane 5, Europes latest unmanned satellite rocket at the time exploded after approximately 37 seconds from its launch from coast of french Guiana. The rocket flipped by 90 degrees into the wring direction, after that boosters got ripped apart from the rocket which ignite the self distrust mechanism of the rocket. This disaster is still considered as one of the most expensive software failures in the history.
Alright. What went wrong and where. The fault which cause this disaster was quickly identified as a software bug in a system of the rocket which detect whether the rocket is pointing up or down. This is known as horizontal bias AKA BH value. This BH value is represented by 64-bit floating variable. The problem occurs when the software tried to convert this 64 bit variable into 16 bit integer. In the first few seconds of the launch, This conversion happened smoothly since the velocity of the rocket is relatively slow. But once the rocket got speed-up, this 64 bit BH value exceed the limit which an integer can handle and then populated a faulty value as the BH.
In 1999, One of the NASAs spacecraft known as "Mars Climate Orbiter" got destroyed in the Mars Atmosphere. Once the investigation was done on the disaster, they found out that the spacecraft went really low to the atmosphere of Mars and got destroyed. Estimated cost due to this disaster is $193 million. And the root cause of this lost is also a software bug in unit conversion.
This is a typical software integration issue which developers facing regularly and surprisingly this bug went into the live system of the spacecraft. So how this happened ? Two teams worked on two different components of the system. NASA recommended to use metric units as in European region. One team follows the recommended units and other used imperial units (used in US region). When these two systems got integrated the conversion got messed up.
Black Friday Fire Sale is always make issues for Walmarts systems and servers due to the huge amount of organic traffic flowing in to the systems at one time. 2011 Black Friday sale is one of the most significant example for this. Thousands of users faced login issues, empty shopping carts, broken checkout pages, half broken payment flows and many more on the day. This led to the customers desired items go out of stock before they could buy what they want.
Lots of people made public complaints about this issues and the chaos did not stop there. More than 20 people in the Walmart physical stores got pepper sprayed by the customer and 2 people got shout in the store on the same date. Just for your information on how intense this Black Friday Fire Sales are 12 people died and more that 117 people got injured since 2006 till now in Black Friday sales process.
BlackBerry users of Europe, US, Canada, Middle East and South Africa in 2011 faced issues with their text massaging and internet access. Over 70 million of users affected by this and they left with out text messaging and internet access for 3 whole days.
Root cause for this outage of services is a failed network switch in the BlackBerry Core Network. These switches are specialized set of computers which handles the network traffic over internet. In this case, the switch failure happened in the part where the email, internet browsing and instant messaging handled. After dramatic 3 days, Blackberry managed to bring the network up. But due to this, lots of customers of BlackBerry eventually moved out from and started using iOS and Android mobiles.
Dell is unarguably one of the top guns of laptop manufacturing industry. They have their up and downs but they managed to keep up their good name on top at any cost. Rumors about laptops causing fires is there for long period of time but one incident managed to make it to the newspapers first page. In 2006, One of the laptops manufactured by Dell got explodes and burst into flames when it was showcased at a trade show in Japan.
After this incident went viral, Dell put up a broad investigation on the issue and found out that the problem is once power supply unit got connected to the battery, specific type of batteries got overheated while charing and eventually caught with fire. Once Dell got this issue confirmed, they put the blame on "SONY", the manufacture of that battery. Not stoping from there, Dell decided to recall over 4 millions of Dell laptops and replace the batteries at their cost.
The typical software bug AKA "One program does not talk to other" which we discussed before as well hits the Airbus A380 in year 2016. Surprisingly in this case, it is not two separate programs but the two versions of the same application called "CATIA" which used to design and assemble A380s.
In simple, Two teams who worked on the Airbus design used two different versions of CATIA software, which eventually led to an assembling disaster as cable connection messed up between two components of the airbus due to the CATIA version mismatch. Eventually they resolved the issue but it cost a huge figure which did not revealed and the whole project got delayed by a year.
The Knight Capital Group, one of the largest financial services firm in America, claimed that it lost $440 million in no time due to a glitch in their trading software. Due to this software glitch, it accidentally bought tremendous amount of stock without proper analysis. One they sold all of these accidentally bought stock, they apparently lost $440 million. Not only they suffered from this, but parallel to this, more that 140 other companies listed in NewYork Stock Exchange also suffered from major disruptions in their stock values.
Just few weeks after it's grand launch to public, this magnificent device(at that time 😇) started to explode due to overheating problem of its batteries. Samsung tried to put some temporary fixes into the issue, but sooner they decided to stop the production of the mobile. This disaster cost billions of dollars to the company due to the amount of money which they put into mobile designing and manufacturing.
A website launched by US government in 2013 named healthcare.gov suffered from huge number of issues once its went live. Starting from "really slow loading time" to "unacceptable waiting times for functionalities" and "data went missing" issues, users of the site had difficult time in accessing the website. By the time, estimates shows that only 1% of its users were actually got the chance to enroll with the program.
Please put your valuable comments and feedback below on the discussed topic.
Plus if we missed any interesting incidents, do pass it through to us.
Alright. What went wrong and where. The fault which cause this disaster was quickly identified as a software bug in a system of the rocket which detect whether the rocket is pointing up or down. This is known as horizontal bias AKA BH value. This BH value is represented by 64-bit floating variable. The problem occurs when the software tried to convert this 64 bit variable into 16 bit integer. In the first few seconds of the launch, This conversion happened smoothly since the velocity of the rocket is relatively slow. But once the rocket got speed-up, this 64 bit BH value exceed the limit which an integer can handle and then populated a faulty value as the BH.
3. Mars Climate Orbit Disaster - 1999
This is a typical software integration issue which developers facing regularly and surprisingly this bug went into the live system of the spacecraft. So how this happened ? Two teams worked on two different components of the system. NASA recommended to use metric units as in European region. One team follows the recommended units and other used imperial units (used in US region). When these two systems got integrated the conversion got messed up.
4. Walmart's Black Friday Disaster
Lots of people made public complaints about this issues and the chaos did not stop there. More than 20 people in the Walmart physical stores got pepper sprayed by the customer and 2 people got shout in the store on the same date. Just for your information on how intense this Black Friday Fire Sales are 12 people died and more that 117 people got injured since 2006 till now in Black Friday sales process.
5. BlackBerry Blackout - 2011
Root cause for this outage of services is a failed network switch in the BlackBerry Core Network. These switches are specialized set of computers which handles the network traffic over internet. In this case, the switch failure happened in the part where the email, internet browsing and instant messaging handled. After dramatic 3 days, Blackberry managed to bring the network up. But due to this, lots of customers of BlackBerry eventually moved out from and started using iOS and Android mobiles.
6. Exploding Laptops by Dell
After this incident went viral, Dell put up a broad investigation on the issue and found out that the problem is once power supply unit got connected to the battery, specific type of batteries got overheated while charing and eventually caught with fire. Once Dell got this issue confirmed, they put the blame on "SONY", the manufacture of that battery. Not stoping from there, Dell decided to recall over 4 millions of Dell laptops and replace the batteries at their cost.
7. Airbus A380s Software Faults
In simple, Two teams who worked on the Airbus design used two different versions of CATIA software, which eventually led to an assembling disaster as cable connection messed up between two components of the airbus due to the CATIA version mismatch. Eventually they resolved the issue but it cost a huge figure which did not revealed and the whole project got delayed by a year.
8. Knight Capital Stock Market Disaster
9. Exploding Samsung Galaxy Note7s
10. Healthcare.gov launch disaster
Please put your valuable comments and feedback below on the discussed topic.
Plus if we missed any interesting incidents, do pass it through to us.
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