1. In August of 2006 a U.S. government student loan service erroneously made public the personal data of as many as 21,000 borrowers on it’s web site, due to a software error. The bug was fixed and the government department subsequently offered to arrange for free credit monitoring services for those affected
2. A September 2006 news report indicated problems with software utilized in a state government’s primary election, resulting in periodic unexpected rebooting of voter checking machines, which were separate from the electronic voting machines, and resulted in confusion and delays at voting sites. The problem was reportedly due to insufficient testing
3. Software bugs in a Soviet early-warning monitoring system nearly brought on nuclear war in 1983, according to news reports in early 1999. The software was supposed to filter out false missile detections caused by Soviet satellites picking up sunlight reflections off cloud-tops, but failed to do so. Disaster was averted when a Soviet commander, based on what he said was a ‘…funny feeling in my gut’, decided the apparent missile attack was a false alarm. The filtering software code was rewritten
