Top 10 The Worst Computer Breakdowns Ever
10. Mars Climate Orbiter
Launched into Martian orbit on December 11, 1998, the Mars temperature Orbiter was a tiny spacecraft that NASA hoped would research Mars’ atmosphere and offer light on the red planet’s temperature and potential surface changes. The probe appeared to be heading towards Mars without incident during the launch, but the Earth-based mission control crew had no idea that the spacecraft was being directed on a course that would cause the mission to fail.Two groups of navigators, one using imperial units and the other metric, were guiding the orbiter. A course correction brought the Mars Climate Orbiter dangerously near to the planet, and it was probably brutally burnt and destroyed in the atmosphere as a result of this simple conversion error and Lockheed’s misconfiguration of the computer systems.
9. Eleanor 5
Extended clip from “Ariane 5” Explosion or failure during rocket launch
The European Union uses the Ariane 5 heavy-lift space rocket type. It has been regularly improved and changed to be more efficient, dependable, and powerful, and it is still in use today. Twenty European nations, including the UK, France, and Germany, collaborated to create it.
The first Ariane 5 rocket, after its initial development, was ready for its inaugural flight on June 4, 1996, when it lined up on the launchpad.[2] in As predicted, the rocket began to accelerate upward and turn at a significantly greater pace than its predecessor, the Ariane 4, as soon as it ignited the engines on both its core stage and its huge boosters. It then ascended into the sky. Regrettably, this was the precise cause of the rocket’s failure.Despite reusing the Ariane 4’s internal computers and software for tracking speed and orientation on the Ariane 5, the new rocket’s faster speed caused the computers to encounter a “hardware exception” when trying to convert a 64-bit floating point number to a 16-bit integer. In essence, the stronger rocket quickly outpaced the older systems, leading to a miscommunication that caused the stored numbers to change from 32,768 to -32,768, which in turn caused the rocket to make an abrupt descent, which ultimately led to a disastrous breakup and explosion in the sky, obliterating the rocket and its cargo.
8. Knight Financial Resources
Financial services provider Knight Capital was situated in the United States and traded extremely valuable stocks on a global scale. With a market share of about 17% on NASDAQ, it was the leading American trader.Everything fell apart on August 1, 2012, with little warning.the third Knight Capital’s automatic computer systems started purchasing and selling millions of shares across hundreds of stocks at the opening of the stock market that morning. They continued doing so for 45 minutes until they were isolated and stopped. Knight Capital lost more than $440 million, or almost $10 million every minute, due to having to sell these shares back at low rates.The technician had installed new trading software on one of the machines incorrectly, leading to the error and briefly destabilising the entire stock market. After this disaster, another financial firm, Getco, had to buy out Knight Capital because the former couldn’t afford to stay in business and needed to be “rescued” by other companies.
7. The Stuxnet Trojan
It is believed that the United States and Israel collaborated on the development of a cyberweapon from 2005 until its discovery in 2010, when the malware known as Stuxnet was identified. Stuxnet was widely believed to be the first malware programme with the explicit goal of wreaking physical harm to actual mechanical systems in the real world.It appears that Stuxnet was primarily used to target Iran’s nuclear programme. It infected the computer systems of the nuclear plant at Natanz and caused devastating equipment manipulation. It seems to have sneaked in through, of all things, a plain old USB device that anyone can detect. An estimated 1,000 nuclear centrifuges, or 10% of the total number at the facility, violently tore themselves apart between November 2009 and late January 2010 due to fluctuations in rotor speed caused by this infection.[4] To successfully induce instability, Stuxnet instructed the centrifuges to boost and then decrease their rotational speeds. Estimates put Iran’s nuclear enrichment efficiency at 30 percent, a significant drop that certainly hampered the country’s nuclear programmes, as a consequence of this damage.
6. WillCry
Ransomware affected Windows-based devices in May 2017 as part of a global cyberattack. A type of malicious software known as ransomware encrypts user data, rendering it unusable, and then demands payment to decrypt it and return it to the user.[5] More than 200,000 machines in 150 countries were infected by WannaCry, which primarily attacked earlier versions of Windows such as Windows XP.A ransom of $300 to $600 was requested for each computer. Those who paid the ransom got their data back without a hitch. Tens of thousands of computers running MRI scanners, theatre equipment, and more were targeted, particularly impacting the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. As a result, some non-emergency cases were turned away while the onslaught was contained. The West has put the entire responsibility on North Korea, and the cost estimates put it at a whopping $4 billion worldwide.
5. Interception of the Dhahran Patriot Missile
If identified as hostile targets, the Patriot missile system—a surface-to-air missile system designed in the US—can shoot down both aeroplanes and ballistic missiles. The US and a number of its allies, notably Germany, use it extensively these days. Because of a known software bug, it also failed to protect American troops and planes during the 1991 Gulf War, despite its widespread usage at the time.[6]After 100 hours of operation, the internal clock of a Patriot missile system in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, drifted by 0.34 seconds. The Israelis had noticed this problem two weeks prior and suggested that the United States restart the computers in the system on a regular basis. This did not take place. Deadly 28 American troops were killed when an Iraqi “Scud” ballistic missile struck the US Army facilities in Dhahran on February 25, 1991. The Patriot missile system could have prevented needless loss of life by detecting and intercepting the missile, but it shut down without attempting an intercept because its internal clock was drifting and it looked in the wrong spot.
4. Degradation
Every Intel central processing unit (CPU) manufactured between 1995 and October 2018, together with a small number of ARM CPUs, is susceptible to the Meltdown vulnerability. Because Intel CPUs are used by almost every computer, security experts have labelled the vulnerability as “catastrophic” and, at first, they didn’t think the claims were accurate because of how serious they were.By circumventing security measures meant to prevent it, Meltdown takes advantage of the way modern CPUs work and lets processes running on a computer see all information that the CPU is currently using. The ramifications of this are catastrophic—a hacker utilising Meltdown as an attack vector may potentially gain unauthorised access to personal data, photos, passwords, and more, all while evading antivirus programmes.[7] Both Intel and Microsoft have issued urgent security updates to address this vulnerability; nonetheless, there have been reports of performance drops ranging from 5% to 30% as a result. This exploit is definitely damaging because of how common it is.
3. Spectre Spectre is very much like Meltdown.
Even though it was discovered in 2018, its scope is much broader now. Spectre impacts nearly every computer system as of 2019, in contrast to Meltdown, which primarily targets Intel CPUs. It has come to light that certain Spectre variants cannot be adequately addressed with software patches alone and will necessitate the implementation of new hardware patches.Spectre is able to accomplish its malicious goals by deceiving programmes into accessing seemingly harmless memory, which an attacker may then use to steal sensitive information without the user’s knowledge or consent.[8] The newly launched Intel Ice Lake and AMD Zen 2 CPUs are among the few CPUs that are not vulnerable to this exploit at the time of writing. Software patches, similar to those for Meltdown, can be implemented, however they also cause unexpected reboots and performance decreases, just like Meltdown. Spectre is probably influencing you at this present moment, and it will be a long time before it goes away entirely unless hardware mitigations are implemented on every single computer system.
2. I adore you.
Tens of millions of people all over the globe began receiving emails with the subject “ILOVEYOU” on May 5, 2000. A brief phrase such as “Please read the attached LOVELETTER from me” and an attached attachment were typical components of the emails. Millions of curious people, maybe looking for love, accessed the file named “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs,” activating the script it contained.[9]A secret script might swiftly propagate itself by overwriting random files on the PC and sending an identical duplicate to every Outlook address. The ILOVEYOU movement started in the Philippines and has since expanded throughout the US, Europe, and Hong Kong. The infection was believed to have cost roughly $15 billion to eradicate from computer systems and caused about $8 billion in losses globally. Fifty million infections were recorded in under ten days, and 10% of the world’s Internet-connected machines were impacted.
1. Dreamliner 737 MAX
The narrow-body, twin-engine passenger planes designed by Boeing in the late 1960s are getting on in years, but there is a newer version in the series called the Boeing 737 MAX. Updating and improving the 737 on a regular basis since then has made it suitable for the modern aviation industry. One may argue, nevertheless, that the 737-MAX went too far in this regard.Due to its rushed development and manufacture, the 737-MAX required increased efficiency to maintain minimal fuel costs. It was unable to accomplish this with its conventional wing-mounted engines because they were too big. A number of changes to its flying characteristics resulted from the compromise of mounting the bigger engines further forward than usual. Boeing installed a technology called MCAS to compensate for these changes without increasing the expense of pilot retraining. When an excessive angle of attack is detected, the nose of the aircraft is automatically pushed down. Tragically, two 737 MAX planes, one operated by Lion Air in October 2018 and the other by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed within months of each other. A total of 346 lives were lost as a result of the aircraft being forced to the ground by the MCAS system. Worldwide grounding of the 737-MAX and prohibition of passenger flights have resulted from safety concerns following these two crashes.
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