case-study
3 articles
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Ariane 5, Flight 501: How One Overflow Blew Up a Rocket in 40 Seconds
On 4 June 1996, the first Ariane 5 self-destructed 37 seconds after launch. The cause: an overflow converting a 64-bit float to a 16-bit int in reused Ariane 4 code. A first-person breakdown: what happened, why redundancy didn't help, and six QA lessons on code reuse, boundaries, dead functionality, error handling, and testing in the real configuration.
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Knight Capital: how $440M vanished in 45 minutes because of one deploy
A QA-eye breakdown of the August 1, 2012 disaster: a reused feature flag, an unnoticed 8th server, the dead Power Peg code, and 97 ignored alerts. 7 lessons and a 10-point release-process checklist.
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CrowdStrike, July 2024 — how a single driver bricked 8.5 million Windows machines in 78 minutes
The most expensive software failure in history — $5.4B in direct losses. A trivial off-by-one on the side of an internal validator. Full timeline, root cause, three separate QA failures, and 10 lessons for your team.