The Worst Time-Based Coding Mistakes in History
Nightmares about how slightly faulty code resulted in lost money and lives.
Tiwai Point
The Tiwai Point Aluminum Shelter is located in New Zealand. It is the home of perhaps the best aluminum production in the world — in 2015, they produced 335,000 tons. The operation is so large, it accounts for 13% of New Zealand’s entire electricity input. In 1996, though, a small error had catastrophic consequences.
1996 happened to be a leap year, and at midnight on New Year’s Eve, all the computer systems in the Smelter simultaneously errored. The computers weren’t coded to handle 366 days in a year, and so all 660 computers shut down through some faulty calculation. As such, the smelting operation ground to a halt, causing overheating in some pots and irreparable damage across a number of them. This cost the manufacturers over $1 million in damages.
NASA’s Deep Impact
The mission of the Deep Impact spacecraft, launched by NASA in January 2005, was to probe beneath the surface of a comet. While the spacecraft did complete its mission, it had a lot more potential to offer — that is, until NASA unexpectedly lost communications with it. You see, the spacecraft didn’t measure time directly with its clock, which used a 64-bit floating point number…
