I work on automatic repair of software bugs. I love good bugs stories.
Classical (catastrophic)
These are even meme.
Ariane 501 bug “The internal SRI software exception was caused during execution of a data conversion from 64-bit floating point to 16-bit signed integer value”
Mars Orbiter’s bug crashed the probe because of an imperial-to-metric conversion bug.
Therac 25 bug killed 6 people.
Northeast blackout of 2003 lasted between 5 hours and two days, and affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states
Heartbleed bug was a security shock
AT&T bug blocked millions of phone calls on Jan 1990.
Classical (fun)
Zune bug was bad press for Microsoft
Casino Bug: “Sorry ma’am you didn’t win $43M – there was a slot machine ‘malfunction’”. Ars Technica.
Original
Underflow bug at Spotify: “The bug went unnoticed for 710 days and the code was probably executed 100 trillion (1014) times before it crashed. This is understandable, since the bug needs very special circumstances to happen.”
Text disappear in QtWebKit “Yet, these 16 chars cost around 1200$ in direct labour time and 3 engineers were involved.”
Xorg very slow “the guilty software component is not the one we may accuse”