Software glitches

It serves , people in the city and provides expert care for 5. Source: Digitalhealth. In September , Cisco Systems released a critical security bulletin to announce an IT exposure that could allow remote unauthenticated users to get access to its email security appliances.

The company further indicated that there is a way out of this that can stop this remote access to the email appliances. Source: Threatpost. Cisco again! The vulnerabilities declared allowed remote access to systems that could enable a hacker to execute code on targeted devices.

In September , the US government in a dramatic move ordered Volkswagen to recall about , cars after learning that the company had deployed advanced software to cheat emission tests and allowed its cars to produce 40 times more emissions than the decided limit. The company further admitted it and announced a recall as well. In October , Interlogix, a wireless personal panic devices manufacturer recalled about 67, devices due to its inability to operate during emergency situations.

The probable cause for this glitch in operations was that the device was unable to communicate with the security system during an event of emergency. The way out was the manufacturer replacing the devices. Furthermore, the consumers could contact their professional security system installer and call for a free monitoring and if required free replacement. In February , the Federal Agency suffered from a hardware failure.

IRS announced that the hardware failure has affected numerous tax processing systems that went out of service, including the modernized e-file system and another related system. Majority of the folks trying to file taxes online could not complete the process. Later IRS made amendments and worked to restore regular operations to get back to the routine. Source: Newyork. In April , Emergency services got stalled for six hours for seven US states.

This affected 81 call centers, literally speaking about 6, people made calls and were unable to connect across the seven states. The nationwide outage was the third major outage in three years across telecom operators of the call system. Source: Wsj. While responding to the shut down, NYSE announced that there was no cyber breach within the system and it resumed operations after 4 hours. Though the issue was prevalent since April , it got noticed only in December The damage caused is yet to be estimated.

For over 2 years Nissan recalled over a million cars, thanks to a software glitch in the airbag sensory detectors. One of the most known glitches in history, Amazon 1p price glitch, where third-party sellers listed on Amazon saw their products being priced at 1p each. While the products got delivered, numerous small time retailers had to appeal to the customers for returning the items. Smart customers quickly collected goods worth thousands after the news was spreading across twitter.

Eventually, the website had to close down. Source: Telegraph. Flipkart apologizes for Big Billion Day sale fiasco. In October , Filpkart, India based e-commerce giant, sent a note to its customers apologizing for the glitches that took place on the Big Billion Day Sale. While the sale helped the ecommerce giant garner a billion hits in a day, it was certainly a PR nightmare for the brand.

Source: Livemint. In , a failed upgrade to CA7 batch processing software by RBS IT staff resulted in breakdown of systems that affected millions of customers. Why Software Testing is Critical NYSE and United were both quick to point out that their respective shutdowns were not the result of a security breach or outside attack. In reality, many software glitches that bring critical systems to a halt are internal—and preventable.

NYSE officials say they were deploying new software that seemed to have compatibility issues with other software used for trading. Without proper planning it may be a difficult and time consuming process to back out the problematic changes.

When the systems handle high transaction volume, like the NYSE, it can make the issues more difficult to sort out. Tips to Prevent Outages Many of my suggestions below may seem like common-sense, and they are! But many large companies still underestimate the value of quality assurance and testing , and thus put themselves at greater risk for being the next United or NYSE.

According to the National Cyber Security Centre, the failure was due to technical issues as opposed to a cyber attack yet it still caused wide disruption as GPs were unable to access blood and X-Ray results. It also caused a backlog as patients could not be contacted to cancel appointments, and notes could not be typed up and saved on NHS systems.

At the start of , Google researchers revealed CPU hardware vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre had affected almost all computers on the market. Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers that discovered the flaw at Graz University of Technology described Meltdown as "one of the worst CPU bugs ever found". Although these are both primarily hardware vulnerabilities, they communicate with the operating system to access locations in its memory space. Read next: Meltdown and Spectre chip flaw timeline.

Meltdown, Google explains , "breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system. This allows a program to access the memory, and also the secrets, of other programs and the operating system. Spectre meanwhile "breaks the isolation between different applications" — "it allows an attacker to trick error-free programs, which follow best practices, into leaking their secrets.

The attack was due to vulnerabilities found in Microsoft operating systems installed in millions of computers around the world. See also: WannaCry ransomware timeline. According to Microsoft, the Windows versions that were vulnerable to the attack were versions which were no longer supported by Microsoft such as Windows 8 and Windows XP, which the NHS trusts and affected companies seemed to be running.

In February , Cloudflare faced a major software bug that led to sensitive customer data like passwords, cookies and authentication tokens to get leaked from customer websites. Cloudflare is known to provide performance and security services to millions of customer websites and although the bug was patched within hours, it is expected that the data leakage could have started as early as September Bitcoin Unlimited suffered a serious memory leak which caused several nodes to fall from to about This is almost 70 percent of the nodes run by Bitcoin Unlimited at the time.

Although the memory leak was patched fairly quickly, this appeared to be the third memory leakage to crash the preferred method for Bitcoin Unlimited. For the sixth time in a year, British Airways faced a massive global IT failure which led to the airline cancelling all flights from Heathrow and Gatwick in May The IT failure affected over 1, flights, British Airways call centres, the website and mobile app.

Nest said the fault had been caused by a December 4. It has since rolled out a 4. Millions of the bank's customers were unable to access online accounts.

Services only returned to normal after a two-day outage. In December a glitch caused more than 3, US prisoners to be released early. According to reports, the problem has been ongoing for 13 years until a new IT boss was appointed and informed the governor's office. It is estimated that on average prisoners were released 49 days early. HSBC again! In August a reported , individual payments failed to be processed by HSBC, which left many potentially without pay before the Bank Holiday weekend.

The cause of this major failure was a problem with its electronic payment system for its business banking users which affected salary payments. Bacs is the payment system that is used for payment processes across the UK is reported to have picked up on the issue but noted that it was an 'isolated issue'. According to reports this error has been inflating spouses' finances since April but was only brought to like in December According to the Office of National Statistics there were , divorces in England and Wales in so the damage that this fault has caused is yet to be fully revealed.

In April this , Bloomberg's London office suffered a software glitch resulting in their trading terminals going down for two hours.

In a statement Bloomberg said: "Service has been fully restored. We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic. In June about , payments failed to enter the accounts of RBS overnight — including wages and benefit payments. Many took several days to come through. In 6. Over the past two years Nissan has been recalling airbags adding up to over 1 million cars.

The software failure was due to a glitch in the airbag's sensory detectors. In short, the affected cars could not detect whether an adult was sat in the car's passenger seat and as a result the airbags would not inflate. There has been a reported two accidents due to this software failure.

Back in April , Starbucks witnessed a register malfunction which according to Starbucks, was caused by an 'internal failure' during its routine refresh. This resulted in 60 percent of stores in the US and Canada being forced to close. The affected stores were unable to process payment transactions and at one point many stores were giving the coffee away for free.

In March F Joint Strike Fighter aircrafts fell victim to a serious glitch, a software bug meant that the aircraft could not detect targets correctly. The sensors on the plane couldn't tell the difference between a singular or multiple threats. It is now expected to be available for the deadline instead. The Co-op apologised and promised to reimburse people within 24 hours. Eagle-eyed shoppers had a field day, but scores of small businesses were left having to absorb heavy losses.