The 7 Most Expensive Bugs in History

NASA Mars Climate Orbiter - $193 Million

Nasa’s Mars Orbiter was the second probe in their Mars Surveyor Program which also included Mars Global Surveyor which was launched in November 1996 and Mars Polar Lander which was launched in January 1999.

They were designed to arrive at roughly the same time to conduct experiments on the Mars surface, climate, and atmosphere. It was supposed to arrive in orbit on September 23, 1999.

The Scientists at NASA were hoping that once the spacecraft reaches Mars it’ll help them reconstruct the climate history and also find signs of water on the surface. After the end of this mission, it would also act as a communication relay for future Mars missions.

On September 23, 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter started its orbit insertion burn as planned. The spacecraft was scheduled to re-establish contact after passing behind Mars and then send signals, but unfortunately, no signals were received from the spacecraft.

An investigation indicated that the failure resulted from a navigational error due to commands from Earth being sent in English units (in this case, pound-seconds) without being converted into the metric standard (Newton-seconds).

The error caused the orbiter to miss its intended orbit (87 to 93 miles or 140 to 50 kilometers) and to fall into the Martian atmosphere at approximately 35 miles (57 kilometers) in altitude and to disintegrate due to atmospheric stresses.

Mariner 1 - $18.5 Million

The Mariner One Incident, also known as the most expensive hyphen in the history of mankind was another one of NASA’s blunders which were very small but the company lost millions.

The Mariner 1 was launched on July 22, 1962, at 9:21 AM, and less than 5 minutes from the launch, the mission had to be forcefully aborted and one of the most historic flights of mankind came down crashing to the ground. It was all because of a tiny typo in the mathematical code.

On its website, NASA quoted “The booster had performed satisfactorily until an unscheduled yaw-lift maneuver was detected by the range safety officer. Faulty application of the guidance commands made steering impossible and was directing the spacecraft towards a crash, possibly in the North Atlantic shipping lanes or in an inhabited area. [A range safety officer subsequently ordered its destructive abort.]”

A few days after the crash, The New York Times published an article that explained the reason behind the crash. It said that the error had been the result of “the omission of a hyphen in some mathematical data.” Purportedly, a programmer at NASA had left out the symbol while entering a “mass of coded information” into the computer system.

A few days later, Richard B. Morrison, a NASA official, presented a case for the rocket’s destruction before Congress and stressed the significance of the tiny omission: “[The hyphen] gives a cue for the spacecraft to ignore the data the computer feeds it until radar contact is once again restored. When that hyphen is left out, false information is fed into the spacecraft control systems. In this case, the computer fed the rocket in hard left, nose down and the vehicle obeyed and crashed.”

Ariane 5 Flight 501 - $8 Million

On June 4, 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off from Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing millions.

A board of inquiry investigated the causes of the explosion and in two weeks issued a report. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. The software installed on Ariane 5 was originally developed for Ariane 4. Ariane 5 had a more powerful engine which caused a bug that wasn’t possible for previous versions.

A 64-bit floating-point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer that could be stored in a 16 bit signed integer, and the conversion failed. Thus, in the 39th second, the rocket started to collapse and self-destruct, induced by aerodynamic forces.

Pentium Processor Bug - $475 Million

The Pentium FDIV bug is the most famous or rather infamous of the Intel microprocessor bugs. It aimed to become faster and more accurate but instead got bugged and it was caused by an error in a lookup table that was a part of Intel's SRT algorithm.

With a goal to boost the execution of floating-point scalar code by 3 times and vector code by 5 times, compared to the 486DX chip, Intel decided to use the SRT algorithm that can generate two quotient bits per clock cycle, while the traditional 486 shift-and-subtract algorithms were generating only one quotient bit per cycle. This SRT algorithm uses a lookup table to calculate the intermediate quotients necessary for floating-point division. Intel's lookup table consists of 1066 table entries, of which, due to a programming error, five were not downloaded into the programmable logic array (PLA). When any of these five cells are accessed by the floating-point unit (FPU), it (the FPU) fetches zero instead of +2, which was supposed to be contained in the "missing" cells. This throws off the calculation and results in a less precise number than the correct answer(Byte Magazine, March 1995).

At its worst, this error can occur as high as the fourth significant digit of a decimal number, but the possibilities of this happening are 1 in 360 billion. It is most common that the error appears in the 9th or 10th decimal digit, which yields a chance of this happening of 1 in 9 billion. Disgruntled customers, however, decided that every user deserved to get properly working hardware and requested replacements.

Morris Worm - $100 Million

Would you believe if I say a student who was trying to solve a problem accidentally created malware that resulted in $100 million worth of losses to compensate for the damage? Well, that’s exactly what happened on November 2, 1988. Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University accidentally created a malware program. It started as a harmless experiment in the program but there was a tiny mistake in the code. The malware was created that started spreading rapidly, blowing out thousands of computers.

Robert Morris was accused of cybercrime and he was fined $10,000 for the same. However, the malware resulted in $100 million dollars as compensation to fix the computers affected.

Morris’s lawyer claimed that the worm helped to improve cybersecurity as it helped to develop antiviruses and also made users aware of such malware in the future. Later, Morris became a co-founder of Y Combinator. He is an associate professor at MIT. A floppy disc with the malware’s source code is stored at Boston University. Well, let’s hope that doesn’t mutate.

Knight Goes Bankrupt - $440 Million

What if one of the key stakeholders of the American stock market starts buying at high prices and selling at low prices? Doesn’t sound like a good trade strategy right? Well, that’s exactly what happened with Knight that almost got them bankrupt.

On the morning of August 1, 2012, something happened that is any CEO’s nightmare. What took 17 years to build nearly came to a collapse in a few hours. Some new trading software contained a bug that only activated when the New York Stock Exchange opened that day. The errant software sent Knight on a buying spree and soon enough the company bought shares in around 150 different companies worth around $7 Billion all in the first hour of trading.

Knight tried to get the trades canceled but Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Mary Schapiro refused. Knight’s buying spree did not shoot up the prices of purchased stocks by more than 30 percent, the cancellation threshold, except for six stocks. Those transactions were reversed. In the other cases, the trades stood.

This was very bad news for Knight and once it was clear that the trades would stand, Knight had no choice but to sell off the stocks it had bought. Just as the morning’s buying spree had driven up the price of those shares, a massive sale into the market would likely have forced down the price, possibly to a point so low that Knight would not have been able to cover the losses.

Goldman Sachs stepped in to buy Knight’s entire unwanted position at a price that cost Knight $440 million.

Y2K Bug - $500 Billion

What harm can One digit do? Back in 1999, it cost $500 Billion Dollars. The Y2K Bug, also known as the Millenium Bug was a computer flaw that caused problems when dealing with dates beyond 31st December 1999. Y2K stands for the Year 2000 that signified the problem the world was going to face when the date turned January 1, 2000.

When complicated computer programs were being written during the 1960s through the 1980s, computer engineers used a two-digit code for the year. The "19" was left out. Instead of date reading 1970, it read 70. Computer Engineers shortened the date because data storage in computers was costly and took up a lot of space back in those times.

As the year 2000 approached, computer programmers realized that computers might not interpret 00 as 2000, but it would interpret it as 1900. All activities that were programmed on a daily or yearly basis would be damaged or flawed. As of December 31, 1999, turned into January 1, 2000, computers would interpret December 31, 1999, turning into January 1, 1900.

Banks and other financial institutes which calculate interest rates on a daily basis faced real problems. Instead of the rate of interest for one day, the computer would calculate a rate of interest for negative 100 years. Power Plants, Transportation and a lot of other sectors would also be affected by this change.

The United States government passed the Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act to prepare for the event and formed a President's Council, that consisted of senior officials from the administration and officials from agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to monitor efforts of private companies to prepare their systems for the event. The research firm Gartner estimated that the global costs to avoid Y2K could have been as much as $600 billion.

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