The need for Reliability of Software

Space industry

Mariner 1: The vehicle was destroyed by the Range Safety Officer 293 seconds after launch at 09:26:16 UT when it veered off course.

Ariane 501: About 40 seconds after initiation of the flight sequence, at an altitude of about 3700 m, the launcher veered off its flight path, broke up and exploded.

Mars Pathfinder : An erroneous implementation of the shared memory caused a priority inversion. An unexpected reset occured.

Mars Polar Lander: The mission ended in failure with the loss of the craft in an incident. The cause of the communication loss is not known but NASA stated that the vehicle did not survive the descent.

Patriots Missile: An American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people.

Failure of AT & T: Three faulty lines of code in 2.1 million lines of instructions were enough to cripple phone service in Washington, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

Therac-25: The Therac shut down after five seconds with an "H-tilt" error message. The Therac's dosimetry system display read "no dose" and indicated a "treatment pause."

"Deadlock" in F16: The Air Force test pilots tried on an early F-16 was to tell the computer to raise the landing gear while standing still on the runway. They scratch one F-16.

DMV computer error puts innocent motorist in jail: A mistake in programming thenew Alaskan Department of Motor Vehicles computer system resulted in a motorist spending a night in a Fairbanks jail. The computer indicated (erroneously) that C. R. Griffin was driving with a suspended license.
Financial Disaster: A group within a company had a policy of dealing only in multiples of one thousand dollars, so they left off the last three digits in correspondence to the wire transfer area to make their job easier. Other groups, however, had to write out the full amount since they did not always deal with such nice round numbers. One day, a transaction was processed that had a value of $500,000. The person who entered the transaction thought that it was from the group who dealt in multiples of $1000 and entered it as $500,000,000. Of course, this was not the case, so a $500,000 transaction became a $500,000,000 one.
Financial Losses: The slow response time caused one program to assume that the host was down. When a transaction finally went through, the system would transmit the DDA information, but the host did not acknowledge that they already had the wire. Thus a large number of wires were being "double posted" (money sent twice). At the end of the day, tens of millions had been double posted. Not all of the double postings had been recovered.

"Compatible" teller machines of 2 British banks handled leap years differently, witholding cash and confiscating cards during New Year holiday
Federal Reserve inter-bank transaction amounts multiplied by 1000 because data input procedures were inconsistent between client banks
Robot killed Japanese auto worker attempting to repair another robot
14000 Ford Lincolns recalled because computer in air suspension system had overheating problem, causing automobile to burst into flames