USS Yorktown Crashes from Zero Division

On September 21, 1997, the $1 billion American warship USS Yorktown suffered a complete propulsion failure while on maneuvers in the Atlantic Ocean. A crew member entered a zero into a database field, which caused the system to attempt a division by zero in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager. The operation triggered a buffer overflow, crashing all computers on the network and leaving the ship dead in the water for two hours and 45 minutes.

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