famous-bugs 🐛 🐝 🐜 🐞
A curated list of problems and bugs that developers may find useful to know.
Table Of Contents
Introduction
As software developers, we can simply define our work as fixing bugs and developing solutions to problems. This is a curated list of problems and bugs that developers may find useful to know. I hope it will become a community driven list to create a value.
Problems
Justin Bieber Problem of Instagram
Bieber would post a photo, and so many Beliebers would "Like" it that Instagram's computers couldn't keep up.
When Justin Bieber posts a photo, so many Beliebers would "Like" it that causes tremendous amount of notifications, queries and processes. This problem faced by the Instagram team is actually a very good example of the thundering herd problem. They did many improvements to avoid this problem happen again and explained in this article.
See also:
Year 2000 Problem
... making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900.
The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, Y2K bug, the Y2K glitch, or Y2K) refers to fails occured becuase of the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates beginning in the year 2000. Many failures were already documented all over the world. Here are some examples:
- On 1 January 1999, taxi meters in Singapore stopped working.
- On 1 January 2000, in Onagawa, Japan, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant at two minutes after midnight.
- On 1 March 2000, In the United States, the Coast Guard's message processing system was affected.
- Norway and Finland had to change their national identification number, to indicate correctly the century in which a person was born.
See also:
NPM Leftpad Breakage
An 11 line npm package called left-pad with only 10 stars on github was unpublished...it broke some of the most important packages on all of npm.
Azer Koçulu had been publishing a simple code he wrote to npm and It became very popular. Many projects has used his package as a dependency. On March 11, he received an email from a patent and trademark agent who works for Kik which was a messaging app. KiK was also the name of another package of him. They wanted him to rename the Kik package but he did not accept. Then the agency forced NPM to do so. After NPM's decision, Azer Koçulu had taken down all of his packages including left-pad. Then, many JavaScript programmers around the world started getting an error message "npm ERR! 404 'left-pad' is not in the npm registry".
See also:
Heathrow Terminal 5 Opening
... simple real scenarios which for some reason weren’t tested.
Heathrow Terminal 5 was officially opened on 14 March 2008. On the day of opening, it did not operate as planned, so It forced British Airways to cancel 34 flights and suspend baggage check-in.
The newest luggage transporting system software couldn’t handle some simple real scenarios which for some reason weren’t tested. For example, a luggage was carried back manually because the owner forgot something in. In this case, the program went off and an item wasn’t recorded. The luggage processing was always disrupted by such kind of little details.
During the following ten days, around 42,000 items weren’t delivered to owners, and over 500 flights were canceled. Check-in to other flights became temporarily unavailable.
See also;
- Technical glitches hit T5 opening
- Heathrow Terminal 5 at Wikipedia
Bugs
The First Bug
First actual case of bug being found.
On September 9, 1947, the Mark II (at Harvard University) broke down. Engineers investigated and diagnosed the cause. A moth had entered the machine and had shorted out relay number 70 of Panel F. They attached the bug to the page with with a note "First actual case of bug found.". This is how the term "bug" was born.
The sheet is kept at the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
See also:
Gangnam Style Broke YouTube
We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer.
YouTube
YouTube's counter was previously using a 32-bit integer which means the maximum possible views it could count was 2,147,483,647. And "Gangnam Style" surpassed the 2-billion-view marker. YouTube has upgraded to a 64-bit integer so that the maximum views a video can receive is now 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
The Explosion of the Ariane 5
... a 64 bit floating point number ... was converted to a 16 bit signed integer.
On June 4, 1996 the Ariane 5 rocket launched by the European Space Agency exploded just forty seconds after its lift-off. The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing $7 billion. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million. The accident was a significant setback for Europe’s space program.
The horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed.
See also:
Metric System Mess Of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate. The navigation team used the metric system in its calculations, while the team designing and building the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English metric system. The acceleration readings measured in units of pound-seconds^2 for a force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.
See also:
The Morris Worm
This was a design flaw ...
According to its creator, Robert Tappan Morris, It was not written to cause damage, but to highlight security flaws. It was programmed to exploit the known vulnerabilities in sendmail, finger, rsh/rexec and weak passwords. While creating the worm, Robert programmed the worm to copy itself 14% of the time to avoid system administrators trying to defeat the worm by instructing the computer to report a false positive. This was a design flaw and created fork bombs and crashes in the affected computer.
The Morris Worm is accepted as one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet and It was the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. A floppy disk containing the source code for the Morris Worm is held at the Computer History Museum.
See also:
Death by IT
One digit was dropped from a computer code to indicate the patients were "deceased" rather than "discharged to home".
In 2002, St. Mary's Mercy Medical Center in Grand Rapids erroneously reported that 8500 patients dead because of a glitch in their patient management software. False death reports weren't only sent to patients but also to the insurance companies and social security offices. There is clear announcement about how the problem was fixed but the management software was changed.
See also:
The 1990 AT&T Network Collapse
An error in just one line of code brought down AT&T's network for several hours.
Before this collapse, AT&T's long-distance network was accepted as reliable and strong. It was carrying over 70% of the nation's long-distance traffic and routing over 115 million telephone calls. This collapse resulted in a $60 million lost as of 75 million missed phone by AT&T customers calls and 200 000 airline and hotel reservations and other businesses that relied on the telephone network.
The bug occured because of a break statement in an if clause nested in a switch clause in the upgraded recovery software of all switches. All the switches became unreliable at the same time while each switch tries to determine if the neighbor switches were reliable or not.
1 while (ring receive buffer not empty and side buffer not empty) DO
2 Initialize pointer to first message in side buffer or ring receive buffer
3 get copy of buffer
4 switch (message)
5 case (incoming_message):
6 if (sending switch is out of service) DO
7 if (ring write buffer is empty) DO
8 send "in service" to status map
9 else
10 break
11 END IF
12 process incoming message, set up pointers to optional parameters
13 break
14 END SWITCH
15 do optional parameter workSee also:
- The 1990 AT&T Long Distance Network Collapse
- All Circuits are Busy Now: The 1990 AT&T Long Distance Network Collapse
ILOVEYOU Worm
The events inspired the song "E-mail" on the Pet Shop Boys' UK top-ten album of 2002, Release, the lyrics of which play thematically on the human desires which enabled the mass destruction of this computer infection.
ILOVEYOU worm was created by Onel de Guzman (a college student in Manila Philippines) and infected over ten million Windows personal computers after 4 May 2000. His purpose was to steal passwords that he could use other users' internet accounts without paying for the service. He stated that the worm was very easy to create, because there was a bug in Windows 95 that would run code in email attachments.
Originally, he designed the worm to only work in Manila. Out of curiosity, he removed this geographic restriction and allowed the worm to spread worldwide. Of course, he did not expect this worldwide spread. The worm moved first to Hong Kong, then to Europe, and finally the United States. Within ten days, over fifty million infections (10% of internet-connected computers in the world) had been reported. To protect themselves, The Pentagon, CIA, the British Parliament and most large corporations decided to completely shut down their mail systems.
The worm provided users a way to modify it and this allowed more than twenty five variations of ILOVEYOU to spread across the internet, each one doing different kinds of damage.
This worm created a public awareness of the real threat of malwares and antivirus software providers entered a golden era of distribution. Aditionally, It helped many people to be more skeptical of emails which were the classic virus delivery systems.
See also:
Contributing
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