Worst Computer Bugs Which Costed Millions of Dollars!
A perfect time to say situations describe your problems. Not your mistake
If you’ve made a mistake, people won’t care about it until that mistake of yours impacts them. In short, it all depends on your surroundings and your situation, on whether or not you would be “punished” for it. And sometimes, a very small mistake… let’s say a very program bug could lead to a lot of damage. In this article, we’ll be having a look at such mistakes done while creating/handling a software which costed millions of dollars of damage.
Morris Worm
A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers
This was a very short but dangerous program bug written initially by a graduate student by the name Morris, who actually had no bad intentions but was just experimenting stuff. I caused so much of damage in the United States and many other major countries, that it was the first software to get mainstream attention from most media groups. It got popular because it inspired the introduction of a new layer of security to computer — The internet security. This was the first worm to break through the internet and damage other computer without cable or a physical medium. This worm was programmed to exploit weak passwords and phrases.
What’s The Bug Here?
Morris wanted to program this for just experimentation purposes. It was meant to stop itself after some time once he got the result of the experiment, but the bug persisted this and in very short time, he affected the computers of the world.
The Y2K Bug
This is a bug did not waste millions directly, but it did cost a lot because of the fear of this. Yes… People spent millions just by the fear that this might damage their lives.
As the year 2000 was approaching, the complete humanity was afraid of a mistake they had committed decades before. To understand this, you need to understand the metric system we have now, and what we had before for calculating anything related to time including research, stats, etc.
Currently the complete system is changed to a constant year number (date). The year number you are living in is of course, 2022 (at the time of writing this), and the computer considers it as 2022. If computers existed before Christ (BC), the years were taken negatively. But this was not how the numbering worked before. Before inventing the computers, we have now, people did not have a long term thought process of what the date could be numbered as. Therefore, they just used the first 2 digits of the year date they lived in. So, if you lived in 1998, the computer would consider just 98 as the important part and discard the other 2 digits. You probably see where I’m going now.
From 2000 on, the numbers were starting to overlap with the last century number, which means that the computers were literally giving you, false information… or at least people thought that this would happen and made a LOT of costly changes throughout. Many Hardwares were sold and bought by many people throughout the world. Some people got anxious and made life changing decisions to overcome this digital time overlap. But, in reality, nothing happened. Yes… In the very first few days, most companies changed their date system and the way it processes them, and everything went to be normal. The estimated loss of what people did just from the fear of this, was more than 1.2 million. But I think it was fairly worth, because if this bug actually existed and the time actually overlapped, then the estimated loss the world would face at the time without considering the inflation, would be more than 200 billion dollars!
This could literally end the world. The computer would stop, the money you have in your credit card would not work, everything could’ve ended. It was such a humungous problem, that the USA appointed a group of “Crisis Experts” to solve this.
Bitcoin Hacked
Mt. Gox was the biggest bitcoin exchange in the world in the 2010s, until they were hit by a software bug that ultimately proved fatal.
This became a problem when there a money transaction to happen at the time and the request was sent to the servers, although due to a bug/error, in the program, the transaction was not completely sent. This caused a huge loss of 1.5 million dollars for the money senders and receivers.
In 2014, they lost more than 850,000 bitcoins again, due to the bug/error through grey hat hacking incident. After this, about 20000 Bit coins were recovered, but then, the rest was not. Considering the actual value of Bit coin right now the money they could have earned, and the money lost while transferring was too much. On an estimate they lost more than 10 million dollars without considering the inflation.
Conclusion
So, what lesson do we learn today? Nothing to be honest. Just be careful about the small bugs you might have in your computer. It might even end the humanity. But being real, bugs are something which we could avoid but not get rid of. The more complex your program gets, the more loopholes you could find. Bugs are normal and are predictably the cause for the end of humanity if AI takes over us.
And indeed, even though the bugs are small and could be easily solved before it was too late, the problem it causes to the world is so big, that it changes the developer's life too drastically…
Let me know if you guys are interested in more of this in the reply section, I would love to me more! With that said, I am making more like this anyways in my YouTube channel, so stay tuned for that as well. Also, I’ll be tweeting some stuff which I find interesting in my Twitter handle as well. I hope you really enjoyed reading this, and this was helpful to you in some way, and I’ll meet you in the next one.
You’re Awesome :)
FadinGeek
