I am not sure if it is refering to the NASA incident you are refering to, but a situation consistent with said failure is described here [0] (section 5.3), alth

I am not sure if it is refering to the NASA incident you are refering to, but a situation consistent with said failure is described here [0] (section 5.3), although it seems like it still assumes some background I do not have to fully understand it. In the situtation described in my link, there were 4 data sources, and 4 processors. A byzantine fault occurred with the link from one of the data sources to the processors. This cascaded into a failure of the entire 4 processor system when it fell into a 2:2 split. In concept, the processors could have communicated with each other and detected a disagreement in one of the four data sources. The software bug is that a fault with one of the data sources cascaded into a fault with the entire processing unit. In a correctly functioning system, the fault should have been contained to just the one data source. That is, the problem should have been no worse then simply losing the bus entirely. Assuming there was sufficient redundancy across the buses, the system could have continued functioning properly despite the fault. However, because the software did not correctly handle the fault, any other redundancy became useless. [0] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/p545-sjoh/post/lec/fault-tolerance/Driscoll-Hall-Sivencrona-Xumsteg-03.pdf https://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/p545-sjoh/post/lec/fault-...