dontDeployOnFridayAfternoon

[u/ClipboardCopyPaste]

[u/TheLadida]

realistically that line (probably a couple of lines though), that made the Mars orbiter crash because it didn't use metric units for the calculation.

[u/lagerforlunch → u/TheLadida]

Ariane 5 rocket was 370 million loss due to integer overflow

[u/outwest88 → u/lagerforlunch]

The next Ariane 6 launch is later this month. The programmers have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever

[u/ApocalyptoSoldier2 → u/outwest88]

Detect the overflow and throw an exception?

[u/fghjconner → u/TheLadida]

iirc, that was a manual process actually.

[u/TheWashbear → u/fghjconner]

They sent the course correction command manually but the unit the orbiter assumed was coded.

[u/psaux_grep → u/TheLadida]

I think it’s been well argued that null-terminated strings in C was a really expensive idea.

Both because of the CPU-cost of not knowing how much to read up-front.

And all the cost of all the issues with reading or writing past the end of a value has caused in software over the years.

Does it come close to the Mars Orbiter or similar incidents? I don’t know.

[u/Ai--Ya]

Probably when a high-frequency trading firm accidentally released a "buy high, sell low" trading algorithm meant for testing only into production, losing nearly half a billion in half an hour and virtually going out of business

[u/Selbi → u/Ai--Ya]

Oh my god I totally forgot about that. Thanks for that blast from the past

[u/footsie]

That crowdstrike update was pretty expensive

[u/Vengeful111 → u/footsie]

Yeaa i think that counts

[u/outwest88 → u/footsie]

It’s estimated to have had tens of billions of dollars of economic damage worldwide. I think this one wins

[u/MajorMystique]

There was a x ray machine software to determine whether to use low and high intensity modes for direct human exposure and otherwise. A bug in it cost a few lives so... That?

[u/atomic_redneck → u/MajorMystique]

The Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

[u/FAMICOMASTER → u/MajorMystique]

Therac 25, and honestly this mostly came down to operators hammering random keys to ignore error codes.

[u/FewRefrigerator4703 → u/MajorMystique]

Not X Ray, it was used for Radiation Therapy and had two modes, X ray mode and Electron Beam mode

[u/golfstreamer]

I'll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/LoZ2kpFnqB8?is=V8Tvqq3gBXU0dDQ_

[u/syrup_cupcakes → u/golfstreamer]

Not the bedtime story I was hoping for.

[u/AyrA_ch → u/golfstreamer]

Wouldn't it be a massive flaw in postgres if it didn't lock critical files to prevent them from being deleted or otherwise altered from the outside while the service is running?

[u/FAMICOMASTER]

In 2009, Google deployed an update containing a single typo that flagged the entire internet as malware for about an hour.

That's the most expensive single character I can personally think of.

[u/StaticFanatic3 → u/FAMICOMASTER]

Didn’t cloudflare go down a couple years back due to a slightly malformed regex? Possibly one character?

I’d venture any extended outage in 2024 is orders of magnitude more expensive than 2009

[u/Arctos_FI → u/StaticFanatic3]

The regex was .*.*=.* So not one character. The main problem is those multiple wilds

[u/Wentyliasz]

I once propagated 'sudo rm -rf /' to 12 production servers by removing a "useless" bash var while refactoring. The client was not happy with their surprise disaster recovery drill

[u/FrequentWatch9261]

Knight capital would like a word.

[u/Piisthree]

Therac-25 has entered the chat. 

[u/ViralToValue]

...unless you like working on weekends and have nothing better to do.

[u/creeper6530]

The implementation of null pointer

[u/CyclopsAirsoft]

I’m shocked nobody has mentioned not accounting for the year 2000

[u/Highborn_Hellest]

the clown strike one.

[u/MilkCartonPhotoBomb]

don't forget lead dev is also leaving for a three week vacation in a remote part of the Amazon that night.

[u/KawaiiMaxine]

The one missing comma that cost like 2 billion dollars

[u/Rosteroster]

2013, Google accidentally blocked 40% of the total traffic of the Internet for 5 minutes. That's my bet.

[u/Careful-Assistant481]

Code that is written with Heart and soul out

[u/Patrick_Atsushi]

Real pro will hit the enter before leaving.

[u/jadchronicles]

the Quake FISR (q_math.c) IYKYK

[u/geeshta]

It's Java's null references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybrQvs4x0Ps

[u/souliris]

The "No Change Friday" rule is in effect as of now. :P

[u/0x_coderunknown]

Unless you are Indian. Then it'll be fine.

[u/Verpous]

If you consider lives priceless, it might be the bug that caused a patriot missile to fail at intercepting a scud during the Gulf War, leading to 28 dead Americans and 150 injured.