How can a simple bug cost a business millions?
What is a bug? A bug is an error or flaw in a computer program resulting in incorrect and flawed results.
A company can face huge losses due to small errors in their system and that is the reason why they spend millions of dollars every year in finding bugs. A lot of people around the world have expertise in finding bugs. These people mint a lot of money by reporting these bugs to the company. Companies offer huge bounties which are popularly known as bug bounties to these bug finders. Nowadays companies even hire people specializing in finding bugs.
Even a small bug in the system can incur huge losses for the company. This is the very reason why companies spend millions in finding bugs. There are several reasons why these software bugs are really harmful to the company. Major reasons include monetary loss and brand damage.
Monetary Loss
A company spends a huge amount of money on finding bugs. It has been estimated that more than 50% of the money needed to develop software is used in finding bugs and removing them. An example of this can be a small error in Pentium’s flagship model intel i486 processor in 1993. The bug in the chip caused it to incorrectly divide floating-point numbers. Due to this bug, the company faced huge customer backlash and it caused huge losses to Pentium.
Brand Damage
A company has many loyal customers who support the company in its ups and downs. Every company wants to live up to the expectations of its customers. Nowadays customers expect the software and apps to be of high quality. The company has the pressure of providing high speed and performance in each of its software and apps. The presence of bugs in any of its software can bring down the brand image and can affect the sales of the company
Most expensive bugs in history
Various bugs have wreaked havoc in the system of several companies. Here, I will list the bugs which caused huge monetary damage to the parent companies.
1. Ariane 5, 1996
June 4th, 1996 was the day when Ariane 5 rocket ignited its engines and was ready to launch but after 37 seconds in the air, the chain of errors and flaws wreaked havoc in the system and paved the way for a disaster. At an altitude of 4 km, the boosters of the rocket ripped off which triggered the self-destruction mechanism, and seconds later the spacecraft was consumed in a gigantic fireball of liquid hydrogen. The disastrous launch cost approximately $370m and delayed scientific research into the workings of the Earth’s magnetosphere. The fault was quickly identified as a software bug in the rocket’s Inertial Reference System. The rocket used this system to determine whether it was pointing up or down, which is formally known as the horizontal bias.
2. Knights $440 million Bug
On 1st August 2012, Knight Capital Group stationed a new software update to their software using which they wanted to be the kings of the stock market but it ended up wrecking huge damage to the group. The bug executed false deals in a matter of a few hours. It bought shares at high prices and sold at low prices and due to which the Group faced a loss of around $440 Million.
Later the company was saved by a cash influx of $400 Million by a group of investors.
3. Toyota Vehicle Recall
In 2009, Toyota announced the biggest recall in their history due to improper installation of all-weather floor mats. Due to this error, the drivers faced the problem of the accelerator getting stuck in the floor mat which resulted in insanely huge vehicle speeds and made it really difficult to stop and it ensued in car crashes causing life-threatening injuries and even death.
It all started with a disastrous car crash in August 2009 due to which huge pressure was put on Toyota to sort out the error and put a flawless model of its cars in the market. Toyota then decided to recall its vehicles from the market. The company decided to recall around 7.5 million vehicles which incurred a loss of $54 million a day and overall a huge loss. In February 2010, Toyota accepted that it will suffer a loss of approximately $2 billion.
4. Mariner 1 spacecraft
Mariner 1 which was launched on July 22, 1962, was the first spacecraft in the American mariner program. A little fault in the source code resulted in a change in its trajectory. Just after 293 seconds of its launch, the spacecraft started heading towards earth which could have resulted in a crash landing due to which the engineers at NASA ordered a self-destructive abort.
Actually, the error was caused just due to the absence of a single bar over R which stands for the radius in a formula written inside the source code of the spacecraft. This error incurred a loss of $18.5 million.
5. Heartbleed Virus
In 2014, a new virus appeared in the OpenSSL cryptography library of TLS protocol.
It was a security bug in the system which was caused due to RAM stack overflow which resulted in hackers barging into the internet servers and stealing private keys and user’s session cookies and passwords. Various reports said that around 17% of all websites were exploited by the bug and users' privacy was compromised.
In March 2014, Google fixed the bug Heartbleed by a quick patch.
Companies can face multiple short-term and long-term negative impacts due to the presence of bugs in their software and applications. It will be better for any company to properly test their product in their trials before releasing them in the market or using them in any of their prestigious and ambitious future projects. Doing this will protect companies from public embarrassment and losses and will be in the interest of both the company and the consumers.
