Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom — a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool. SolarWinds Blog Contact Us. Synthetic Monitoring Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience. LOG IN. Undetected hole in the ozone layer The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica remained undetected for a long period of time because the data analysis software used by NASA in its project to map the ozone layer had been designed to ignore values that deviated greatly from expected measurements.
Deadly radiation therapy The Therac medical radiation therapy device was involved in several cases where massive overdoses of radiation were administered to patients in , a side effect of the buggy software powering the device. Rocket launch errors In , a European Ariane 5 rocket was set to deliver a payload of satellites into Earth orbit, but problems with the software caused the launch rocket to veer off its path a mere 37 seconds after launch. Flight crashes In in Scotland, a Chinook helicopter crashed and killed all 29 passengers.
An explosion seen from space In another Cold War escapade, the CIA allegedly managed to slip the Russians a faulty control software to be used for a major gas pipeline the KGB was to steal the software from a Canadian company, but the CIA had been tipped off. Quirky but mostly useful software development rules.
Why automatic software upgrades are great for innovation. Jus [ From the viral Double [ Many of them were impacted by the outage mentioned above.
This points to one thing — as more and more services rely on AWS's good reputation and move their websites to its servers, even small glitches in a single data center become a really big deal. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the major part of the problem was a specific API that might be used to get access to non-public information. The error had been discovered in March and rectified immediately. Last year Facebook, whose ability to handle the private information had been already questioned, confirmed that nearly 50 million accounts could be at risk.
The attack was detected on September 25, This, in turn, resulted in the acquiring of authentication tokens, thanks to which the user does not have to log in to the site every time.
The cases listed above serve as a reminder of the importance of IT quality assurance of any type of software. They highlight the need for developing an effective approach to testing as a crucial part of the business processes.
The complexity of modern systems is so great that it is usually nearly impossible to perform one particular test and guarantee a perfect result.
In most cases, only a combination of manual testing and automated testing allows you to bring a great product to the market.
It is important to stress; however, the test effort has to be adapted to the priorities of the business. Some modules of the software are often prone to error thus require greater attention of the QA specialists. Testing procedures must be also adapted to the system being tested. Because safety issues are much more critical in some systems than others. See all resources. Insights for CIOs.
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Test Management Tricentis qTest. Customer Experience. Consulting Services. Customer Success. Software failures have wreaked havoc at banks, airlines and the NHS, doing billions of pounds of damage and devastating disruption.
We've taken a look back at what went wrong during some of worst software failures in the history of the UK. Read next: The most significant UK data breaches. More than flights to and from London's Heathrow airport were disrupted on Sunday 16 February, , after it was hit by technical issues affecting departure boards and check-in systems, leaving passengers with little information about their flights and limiting the use of electronic tickets.
A spokesperson for Heathrow said that it could not share any more details as to which systems had been affected "due to the sensitive nature of those processes". We apologise for the inconvenience this caused our passengers. Our teams continue to closely monitor our systems and will be on hand across our terminals to provide assistance to passengers," the spokesperson added by way of a statement.
British Airways was struck by yet another IT glitch in August , when system failures caused more than flights to be cancelled and more than others to be delayed. The incident affected one system for online check-ins and another for flight departures, forcing the airline to revert to manual check-in procedures, leading to long queues at Heathrow, Gatwick and London City airports. The airline said in a statement in the afternoon that the issue had been resolved but some knock-on disruption may continue as a result.
This follows as many as six IT outages at BA since In May an IT failure affected over 1, flights, British Airways call centres, the website and mobile app. According to the GMB Union, the failure could have been avoided if the airline had not made hundreds of its IT staff redundant in Since Mark Zuckerberg brought WhatsApp and Instagram into his social media empire, users have increasingly had to deal with not one but three of their favourite platforms suffering from outages whenever Facebook experiences a technical issue.
In the first week of July , users across the globe found themselves unable to load photos in the Facebook News Feed, view stories on Instagram, or send messages in WhatsApp. On December 6th , more than 30 million O2 users in the UK lost access to data services after a software issue left them unable to use 3G and 4G services.
Customers of O2 and the other companies using its network including Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, Lycamobile, O2 subsidiary Giffgaff were affected after a software glitch in equipment supplied by Ericsson brought the network to its knees. The nationwide outage also affected Transport for London's live electronic timetables at bus stops. Millions of TSB customers were locked out of their accounts after an IT upgrade led to an online banking outage. A planned system upgrade was expected to shut internet and mobile banking services down for one weekend in April , but ended up causing months of disruption.
Immediately after the new system was switched on, many customers experienced problems logging in, while others were shown details from other people's accounts or inaccurate credits and debits on their own.
Customers remained locked out of their accounts two weeks after the initial outage. In July, TSB was still working its way through the backlog of complaints, when another outage struck, locking customers out of their online accounts once again. TSB claimed that the problem was resolved later that day, but the debacle will further rupture the bank's relationship with parent company Sabadell. In , doctors and hospital staff of the Wales NHS experienced a widespread computer failure that led to them being unable to access patient files.
According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the failure was due to technical issues as opposed to a cyber attack yet it still caused wide disruption as GPs were unable to access blood and X-Ray results.
It also caused a backlog as patients could not be contacted to cancel appointments, and notes could not be typed up and saved on NHS systems. At the start of , Google researchers revealed CPU hardware vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre had affected almost all computers on the market.
Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers that discovered the flaw at Graz University of Technology described Meltdown as "one of the worst CPU bugs ever found". Although these are both primarily hardware vulnerabilities, they communicate with the operating system to access locations in its memory space. Read next: Meltdown and Spectre chip flaw timeline. Meltdown, Google explains , "breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system.
This allows a program to access the memory, and also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. Spectre meanwhile "breaks the isolation between different applications" — "it allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets.
The attack was due to vulnerabilities found in Microsoft operating systems installed in millions of computers around the world. See also: WannaCry ransomware timeline. According to Microsoft, the Windows versions that were vulnerable to the attack were versions which were no longer supported by Microsoft such as Windows 8 and Windows XP, which the NHS trusts and affected companies seemed to be running.
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