1. PayPal accidentally makes Pennsylvania man the world's richest person with $92 quadrillion.
Chris Reynolds briefly became the world's richest man after PayPal erroneously credited him with $92,233,720,368,547,800 ($92 quadrillion plus change).
This error made him the world's only quadrillionaire & helped him to overshadow the Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim - who was worth a mere $67 billion (when the event happened in 2013). Reynold's wealth was one thousand times greater than the GDP of the entire planet, yikes!
2. Wiping out $440 million in 30 minutes
On August 1, 2012, Knight Capital deployed untested software to a production environment which contained an obsolete function. The incident happened due to a technician forgetting to copy the new Retail Liquidity Program (RLP) code to one of the eight SMARS computer servers, which was Knight's automated routing system for equity orders. RLP code repurposed a flag that was formerly used to activate the old function known as 'Power Peg'. Power Peg was designed to move stock prices higher and lower in order to verify the behavior of trading algorithms in a controlled environment.
Therefore, orders sent with the repurposed flag to the eighth server triggered the defective Power Peg code still present on that server.
When released into production, Knight's trading activities caused a major disruption in the prices of 148 companies listed at the New York Stock Exchange, thus, for example, shares of Wizzard Software Corporation went from $3.50 to $14.76. For the 212 incoming parent orders that were processed by the defective Power Peg code, Knight Capital sent millions of child orders, resulting in 4 million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares in approximately 45 minutes.
Knight Capital took a pre-tax loss of $440 million. This caused Knight Capital's stock price to collapse, sending shares lower by over 70% from before the announcement. The nature of the Knight Capital's unusual trading activity was described as a "technology breakdown".
On Sunday, August 5 the company managed to raise around $400 million from half a dozen investors led by Jefferies in an attempt to stay in business after the trading error. Jefferies' CEO, Richard Handler, and Executive Committee Chair Brian Friedman structured and led the rescue and Jefferies purchased $125 million of the $400 million investment and became Knight's largest shareholder. The financing would be in the form of convertible securities, bonds that turn into equity in the company at a fixed price in the future.
The incident was embarrassing for Knight CEO Thomas Joyce, who was an outspoken critic of Nasdaq's handling of Facebook's IPO.
On the same day the company's stock plunged 33 percent, to $3.39; by the next day, 75 percent of Knight's equity value had been erased.
3. My favorite is the Millennium bug.
The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, the Millennium bug, the Y2K bug, or Y2K, was a computer bug related to the formatting and storage of calendar data. Problems were anticipated and arose because twentieth-century software often represented the four-digit year with only the final two digits—making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. The assumption of a twentieth-century date in such programs caused various errors, such as the incorrect display of dates and the inaccurate ordering of automated dated records or real-time events.
It identifies two problems that may exist in many computer programs. First, the practice of representing the year with two digits became problematic with logical error(s) arising upon "rollover" from x99 to x00. This had caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after 1 January 2000, and on other critical dates which were billed "event horizons". Without corrective action, long-working systems would break down when the "... 97, 98, 99, 00 ..." ascending numbering assumption suddenly became invalid. Secondly, some programmers had misunderstood the Gregorian calendar rule that determines whether years that are exactly divisible by 100 are not leap year, and assumed the year 2000 would not be a leap year. Years divisible by 100 are not leap years, except for years that are divisible by 400. Thus the year 2000 was a leap year.
Companies and organizations worldwide checked, fixed, and upgraded their computer systems to address the anticipated problem. Very few computer failures were reported when the clocks rolled over into 2000. It is not known how many problems went unrecorded.
Above is an electronic sign displaying the year incorrectly as 1900 on 3 January 2000 in France.
4. Mars Climate Orbiter: The $327 Million Disaster
The Mars Climate Orbiter propelled on December 11, 1998, with the goal of bringing the United States phenomenal comprehension of the main another planet in the close planetary system esteemed fit for supporting life. Shockingly, because of a mistake in the ground-based PC programming, the $327.6 million undertaking — as per the NASA reality sheet — disappeared 286 days after the fact. As a result of an erroneous conclusion, Orbiter entered the Mars air at the wrong passage point and broke down presently.
5. The bug that created the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
You see, GTA was very different from today…
GTA was so buggy it was going to be axed by its publisher (BMG Interactive). The police chasing behavior was the product of a fortuitous bug which made them really aggressive—and fun.
Now the franchise is worth 3.3B USD. Hahaha.
—It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Source: Quora, Wikipedia
Contributor: This Article is Contributed by Nitin Kumar. If you would like to contribute, you can also write an article and mail your article to CIQAGeeks@gmail.com.
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