> In the realm of software engineering I don't know that we've had a catastrophic failure where the infrastructure costs of repair were in the billions or there

> In the realm of software engineering I don't know that we've had a catastrophic failure where the infrastructure costs of repair were in the billions or there was tangible loss of life. The multi-day 2003 blackout in the Northeast US states and Ontario, Canada qualifies in terms of impact (many billions of $). It was a systemic flaw with a software bug as a proximate cause. I think most major failures with high impact in a software-intensive system will sort of look similar: a software fault that cascades to the real world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 Other examples might be the various outages in airline reservation systems. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, the archives of the Usenet newsgroup comp.risks are interesting (not sure if it’s still active).