The Bug Museum 🐛
Famous software bugs that crashed systems, cost billions, and changed the world
Therac-25 Radiation Overdose
6 patients received massive radiation overdoses
A race condition in the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine caused it to deliver lethal doses of radiation. The bug occurred when operators typed commands faster than the software could process them.
Ariane 5 Flight 501
Rocket self-destructed 37 seconds after launch
The European Space Agency's Ariane 5 rocket exploded because a 64-bit floating point number was converted to a 16-bit signed integer, causing an overflow.
Y2K Bug
Global panic and $300B+ in remediation
Programmers in the 60s-80s used two digits for years to save memory. As 2000 approached, systems risked interpreting '00' as 1900, potentially causing widespread failures.
Intel Pentium FDIV Bug
Intel recalled processors, $475M write-off
The Pentium processor's floating-point division unit returned incorrect results for certain rare calculations due to a lookup table error.
Knight Capital Trading Glitch
Company lost $440M in 45 minutes
A software deployment gone wrong caused Knight Capital's trading algorithms to execute millions of erroneous trades in 45 minutes, nearly bankrupting the company.
Heartbleed
500,000+ websites vulnerable
A buffer over-read bug in OpenSSL's heartbeat extension allowed attackers to read server memory, potentially exposing passwords, private keys, and sensitive data.
Log4Shell (Log4j)
Millions of applications vulnerable worldwide
A remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Log4j allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on servers by simply sending a specially crafted log message.
Mars Climate Orbiter
Spacecraft lost, $327.6M mission failure
NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was destroyed because one team used metric units while another used imperial units for thrust calculations.
Gangnam Style YouTube Overflow
YouTube had to upgrade view counter
PSY's 'Gangnam Style' became the first YouTube video to exceed 2,147,483,647 views, overflowing YouTube's 32-bit signed integer view counter.
Northeast Blackout of 2003
55 million people without power
A race condition in FirstEnergy's alarm system prevented operators from seeing warnings about overloaded power lines, leading to a cascading failure across the northeastern US and Canada.
Year 2038 Problem
Pending - systems storing time as 32-bit integers will overflow
On January 19, 2038 at 03:14:07 UTC, Unix time will overflow the 32-bit signed integer limit, potentially causing system failures worldwide.
Cloudbleed
Private data leaked from millions of websites
A buffer overflow in Cloudflare's HTML parser caused random chunks of memory—including passwords and private keys—to be included in HTTP responses and cached by search engines.
Morris Worm
First major internet worm, 6,000+ computers infected
Robert Morris created a worm to gauge the size of the internet. A bug in the reinfection logic caused it to spread uncontrollably, crashing roughly 10% of internet-connected computers.
AT&T Network Collapse
60,000 people lost phone service for 9 hours
A single line of buggy code in a software update caused AT&T's entire long-distance network to crash in a cascading failure.
Patriot Missile Clock Drift
28 soldiers killed when missile failed to intercept
During the Gulf War, a Patriot missile battery failed to intercept an Iraqi Scud missile due to accumulated floating-point errors in the system clock.
Equifax Data Breach
147 million people's personal data exposed
Hackers exploited an unpatched Apache Struts vulnerability to steal sensitive personal data including Social Security numbers from nearly half of all Americans.
Toyota Unintended Acceleration
Linked to 89 deaths, massive recalls
Toyota vehicles experienced unintended acceleration events. While initially blamed on floor mats, software analysis revealed 'spaghetti code' with thousands of global variables and inadequate safety checks.
CrowdStrike Global Outage
8.5 million Windows devices crashed worldwide
A faulty update to CrowdStrike's Falcon sensor caused Windows machines worldwide to enter an infinite boot loop, grounding flights and disrupting hospitals, banks, and businesses.