Patriot Missile Bug Kills 28 Soldiers

In February 1991, during the Gulf War, a U.S. Patriot missile defense system failed to intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The system's internal clock used a floating-point register that could not store time values with perfect precision, causing the error to grow larger the longer the system ran. After more than 100 hours of continuous operation, the tiny rounding error had accumulated enough to throw off targeting, allowing the Scud to strike a U.S. Army barracks and kill 28 soldiers.

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