We start this month on a happy note: June 1, 2018 sees Alabama, the last U.S. state to enact a data breach notification law, has that law go into effect. However, #49, South Dakota, still has another month to go before its law goes into effect.
On June 4, 1996, Ariane 5 Flight 501 self-destructed 37 seconds after launch due to a control software malfunction. The root cause for this spacecraft’s destruction involved data conversion from a 64-bit floating point to a 16-bit signed integer.
On June 8, 2011, The London ambulance service had to revert to CTAK after the new 999 computer system would not function. Paper and radio was used as a temporary work-around.
On June 9, 2011, bitcoin hit a high of $31 (2011 was the first year that bitcoin made it over a dollar). 10 days later (June 19), after a raid on the notorious bitcoin bank-of-choice Mount Gox, bitcoin’s value briefly dropped down to a penny.
On June 10-11, 1999, eBay went down for almost 22 hours (and 6 hours on the 9th, and on and off over the following weekend). Of course, like any other utility, there are sometimes problems. You can view https://www.ebay.com/sts to see scheduled maintenance notices and current system status.
On June 19, 2016, actor Anton Yelchin (known for his portrayal of Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek movies) was killed by his car. A software update already existed to fix the gear shift problem, and a recall had been issued.
On June 26-29, 2014, intermittent software glitches at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 baggage system complicated lives of departing British Airways passengers.
See you in July, where I’m sure we’ll see more things go wrong.
