Large Scale Software Failures

I tend to follow the news quite regularly, and if you are like me, you are probably aware of the catastrophe that is British Airlines and the new Heathrow T5 terminal.  The accumulation of a mountain of 20k pieces of luggage should give you some indication of the size of the problem.  The gist of the story is that a new £4.3 billion terminal just opened, and what was supposed to be a technologically advanced baggage handling system wasn’t quite up to task.

While I haven’t seen an official diagnosis of the problem, I can’t help but wonder if a group of software developers somewhere locked in a closet are to blame–not that I’ve ever seen a project end like that.  I’ll be curiously watching to see what some type of official report says.

This just brings back the thought of the FBI’s Virtual Case File, a $100 million software failure. 

It looks like Jeff Atwood has a nice collection of large scale failures catalogued as well.