Why everyone’s talking about... Computer crashes

Aaargh! I wanted to claim my free £50 bike repair voucher from the Government last week, but couldn’t get on the website.

You weren’t alone, as it was the sheer number of people trying to access the site which made it collapse. It’s frustrating, but not exactly surprising: in the past three months, official websites to book coronavirus tests, to manage track- and- trace, to let the self-employed apply for grants, to fill fruit-picking jobs and to detail the Scottish government’s lockdown exit plan all failed on launch.

Such incompetence! Do we use ‘unprecedented’ yet again?

Hardly. Recent glitches are small fry for Government IT failures. An NHS patient record system abandoned in 2011 flushed £ 10 billion down the drain; the MoD’s secure military network cost £7 billion, more than three times what MPs signed off on; an IT system for magistrates almost trebled its costs to £390 million. Then there’s Universal Credit, payments to farmers, e-borders, an emergency services network and many more projects that either overspent, underperformed, or, usually, both.

But anything we can do, the Americans can do bigger…

Or at least more spectacularly. In 1998, Nasa’s £500 million Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because of software failure: part of the system was using imperial measurements and part metric! In 1962, another rocket was destroyed because of misplaced punctuation in the coding. It could have been worse. In 1993, Soviet systems incorrectly said five US nuclear warheads were heading for Russia. It was only because one commander decided it must have been a bug that the Third World War was averted.

Bug? Where does that word come from?

The story is that engineers coined it in 1945 after investigating problems with Harvard University’s Mark II calculator, and found a moth caught in the machinery. They taped the offending insect into the log book and wrote: ‘First actual case of bug being found’… though that wording suggests the word was already in use.

So how does the Government get things right in future?

Simple. They just need to ¶∞$4^5ss00 _ Code 404 __%%!_ file not found sa)^%$%^777z fatal output 913&&6.