When a tiny bug took 28 lives
A tiny floating-point rounding error in the Patriot’s tracking code slowly accumulated into a timing drift that let a Scud warhead slip past its interceptor.
Neglect of a small floating-point bug in the Patriot’s math built up over hours into a meaningful timing error.
The miscalculation steered the interceptor off course and allowed the Scud fired at Dhahran to hit a barracks.
The strike killed 28 U.S. soldiers and wounded more than a hundred.
The flaw had been identified and a patch existed — but it wasn’t installed in time, turning a preventable software fix into a human tragedy.
R-17 VS Patriot: a Rounding Issue
This is another piece in our series of articles where we talk about the importance of high-quality code in computer systems whose failure can cause huge expenses or casualties. This time we will talk…
