Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tonyedgecombe 2952 days ago
This is true although the number of users has increased since 1968, a defect at Google or Facebook is going to affect millions.
1 comments

Sort of, they actually do rolling updates so that a new version of the code does not affect the whole user base at once. So again, reducing the cost of incorrect software. But it does happen, the VW emission scandal was effectively incorrect code. Noone predicted the 22 billion dollar defect, but due to re-use of components, it is possible.

Long Tail events is a big problem in software and a few lines of code are responsible for a large part of the costs (for a longer version of this answer https://possumlabs.com/the-cost-of-software-bugs-5-powerful-...).

"But it does happen, the VW emission scandal was effectively incorrect code."

I don't think we should call what VW did "incorrect software". It actually did what it was supposed to do.