4 ms·
How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?
by vxxzy 9y ago
How many other examples like this have occurred throughout computing history?
- SamReidHughes 9y agoPlenty, Twitter for example.
- dfox 9y agoIIRC at least slashdot and twitter had to do some non trivial database migrations because they hit maximum value of some ID field.
- mikeash 9y agoTwitter's was called the twitpocalypse and it was a pretty big deal at the time. I don't know how bad it was internally, but it hit a lot of third-party apps that stored tweet IDs in 32-bit integers. One interesting aspect of it was that Twitter realized what was going to happen in advance, and artificially pushed their IDs over the edge at a preplanned time so they could have as many people available as possible to work on any problems that appeared.
- MichaelGG 9y agoI think Instagram also recently (year?) passed the 31 or 32 bit mark, as some client lib I was using started failing.
- cm2187 9y agoWell, famously youtube's views counter overflow from Gangnam Style...
- 0003 9y agoThat was a joke though and they were prepared.
- nisse72 9y agoIP4 address space comes to mind. And I think it isn't uncommon to have to add digits to the front of telephone numbers as regions grow (or telephones become more common) and the number space isn't large enough.
- creepydata 9y agoI mentioned in in another commend but Pacman crashes at level 256 http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Map_256_Glitch http://pacman.wikia.com/wiki/Map_256_Glitch
- Slartie 9y agoWorld of Warcraft for quite some time, I think about 4 years, had a "mysterious" limit for the maximum amount of gold that you could accumulate on a single character. It was 214.748 gold, 36 silver and 47 copper... At least they put an actual check in there - you didn't suddenly overrun and wake up with an enormous debt, so I'll give them some credit for that ;-)
- rsynnott 9y agoA particularly expensive example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)#Launch_failure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)#Launch_...
- eicossa 9y agoIIRC the whole "Gandhi is gonna nuke the rest of the world" meme came from such a bug occuring in the world-domination strategy game Civilization 2.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Bakary 9y agoThey had meant to give him the lowest aggression rating possible, but accidentally inputted -1, which then looped back the other way to the highest rating possible. Nukes soon followed.
- govg 9y agoWas it exactly that? I remember it being that you had to create a senate or something (that decreased character aggression by 2 points). Gandhi started with 1, so if you did it with Gandhi, then it'd underflow to the highest possible aggression.
- matheweis 9y agoMicrosoft Lync has an as-yet unfixed bug where after 49.7103 days (4294967294 aka 2^32 milliseconds) of system uptime, it locks the Lync status indicator to "away". The status indicator is otherwise unusable thereafter until a full system reboot. See: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/1e76e106-4291-4d73-9cdf-5bb4ab2536a1/lync-2011-locks-to-away-after-49-days-of-client-system-uptime?forum=ocsclients https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/1e76e106-4...
- masklinn 9y agoA counter overflow factored in the THERAC-25's race condition (one of the software's interlock was an overflowable counter rather than a flag, if the operator started treatment right as the counter overflowed the system would proceed rather than refuse).