My favorite story, from ten years ago, involves an application program that destroyed the operating system. It was a Solaris 8 env. The first time we ran the program in production, it overwrote the root filesystem, making our powerful Sun box with 28 processors and 28 gigs of memory worthless.
We immediately went into disaster recovery mode, and brought up production on the UAT server. Of course, the first thing they did was run the same program, which wiped out that machine as well.
LOL!
One of my profs at Carnegie Mellon relayed a story from the space shuttle program (well, several stories, but this one is germane) — all systems on board had to be heavily redundant, so they installed four identical copies of the control software.
Of course, when the first one fails and rolls over to the second identical copy, what do you expect it’s going to do with the same bad data? And the third, and the fourth?
An unrelated story had do do with the mechanical folks trying to figure out how much the software weighed...
Was the application running under an account with root privileges, or was the root file system open to accounts with non-root privileges?
We immediately went into disaster recovery mode, and brought up production on the UAT server. Of course, the first thing they did was run the same program, which wiped out that machine as well.
ROFL