Amazon Web Services outlined its post mortem on its S3 outage and the cause boils down to one word: Typo. A typo?!? That's crazy right? Not really. In fact, typos plague software, code and have cost companies billions of dollars. <\/p>\n
The cloud giant offered the following when explaining its outage. <\/p>\n
Folks say misery loves company and the good news for AWS is that the typo club is pretty extensive. Here's a look at some of the pain caused by a simple typo. Consider: <\/p>\n
ZCoin, which allows for private financial transactions, had a \"typographical error on a single additional character in code (that) allowed an attacker to create Zerocoin spend transactions without a corresponding mint.\" The attacker created about 370,000 Zcoins and made a profit of about $400,000. Zcoin is similar to Bitcoin in that it's a digital currency based on cryptography. <\/p>\n
Back in 2014 the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug was blamed on four bytes, roughly four characters. That typo left much of the Web vulnerable. <\/p>\n
In 2013, Fortune recapped the greatest Excel disasters of all time. The common theme? Damn humans added items, changed models and lost billions of dollars. The recap includes J.P. Morgan, which lost $6.2 billion in 2012 with a few bad trades. J.P. Morgan employees added a measure when it should have been averaged. <\/p>\n
Turns out typos have been around as long as code. Priceonomics, a site for data junkies, gave a history lesson on NASA's Venus rocket, which exploded in 1962. What happened? One extra hyphen in the code led to the disaster. <\/p>\n
It doesn't take long to realize that typos have been around as long as code. We can move onto new technologies, but it's likely that the typo will endure. <\/p>\n
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See the article here:<\/p>\n
AWS typo gaffe isn't the first, or last in technology - ZDNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amazon Web Services outlined its post mortem on its S3 outage and the cause boils down to one word: Typo. Continue reading