The AT&T network collapse (1990)
In 1990, 75 million phone calls across the US went unanswered after a single switch at one of AT&T's 114 switching centres suffered a minor mechanical problem, which shut down the centre. When the centre came back up soon afterwards, it sent a message to other centres saying something was wrong, which in turn caused them to shut down and reset.
The culprit turned out to be an error in a single line of code, not hackers, as some claimed at the time that had been added during a highly complex software upgrade. American Airlines alone estimated this small error cost it 200,000 reservations.
This is a disaster because in those 75million calls many could be 999 or in America 911 calls. These would have been missed and then the person calling could be in serious trouble.
They should have tested the new software upgrade because they didn't know it would work when it was properly used, some one should have checked the processers in the system.
http://www.zdnet.com/top-10-worst-it-disasters-of-all-time-1339284034/
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