One of the latest software errors that had widely noticed consequences was Google’s Gmail outage in February. The problem in that case was, according to Google, a bug in the software that distributed load between its different data centers.

The Gmail outage only resulted in people not having access to their email for a few hours. No one got killed. Nothing exploded. It was an inconvenience, and while it was a significant inconvenience for some of Gmail’s users, it was still just that: an inconvenience.

This article is about some of the more dire consequences of software errors through the years. Incidents that make the Gmail outage seem rather trivial.

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