Bizarre Bugs: 9 of the Strangest Software Glitches Ever
Writing buggy applications is a cinch--for decades, the world's software developers have been proving that with just about every program they release. Truly interesting bugs, however, are a relatively rare breed. I'm talking about the kind that cause technology products and services to stop working for extended periods, or that prompt them to behave as if they were possessed or harbored grudges against the humans who use them. And even though the bugs themselves usually stem from mundane errors such as typos or faulty math, their symptoms are anything but boring.
1998: Auction Interruptus
The bizarre symptom: On June 10, eBay--then, as now, the world's dominant online auction site--suffered an outage. Nothing remarkable about that: Throughout the late 1990s, the company's sellers and bidders frequently faced unscheduled downtime. But this outage just kept going and going. By the time the site recovered on June 11, 22 hours had passed and 2.3 million auctions in progress were compromised, forcing eBay to waive a small fortune in fees.
The bug: eBay blamed the meltdown on a corrupted database, and it blamed the corrupted database on buggy Sun Microsystems software. Fourteen months later, the site had a 14-hour outage that was nearly as embarrassing and costly; that time, the company said that hardware problems were to blame.
2005: Surprise Ending
The bizarre symptom: Did you ever suspect that TiVo's mascot--a tiny anthropomorphic TV with a lopsided grin--has a sadistic side? You might have if you owned one of the company's DVRs back in late 2005. That was when couch potatoes began to notice that their TiVos were randomly chopping large chunks off the end of shows, turning many a program with a suspenseful conclusion into a permanent cliffhanger.
The bug: The company took a while to respond, but eventually it concluded that the truncated recordings affected only Series 2 TiVos that had been running continuously for extended periods. Initially it advised owners to power their DVRs off and then on again occasionally, and later it issued a patch designed to eradicate the problem permanently.
2006: Game Over
The bizarre symptom: You could say that Bubble Bobble Revolution, a Nintendo DS remake of the 1980s arcade classic Bubble Bobble, was a surprisingly tough game. Level 30, for instance, was unbeatable--literally. That was a trifle odd given that the game boasted a total of 100 levels.
The bug: As in many arcade-style games, Bubble Bobble Revolution levels ended by challenging the player to defeat an überenemy, known as a boss. But level 30 had no boss to defeat, and therefore no way to continue to level 31. Months later, publisher Codemasters replaced defective cartridges with a debugged version--and threw in another game, Rainbow Islands Revolution, by way of apology.
2007: Skype Down and Out
The bizarre symptom: On August 16, fans of the wildly popular Skype Internet telephony service noticed that Skype wasn't working properly. It wasn't a brief hiccup, either. For most of its millions of users, Skype stayed out of commission for two days--possibly the longest outage ever for any major Web service.
