Busy day.
Wall Street went into a dither after NYSE rolled out software upgrades over night, which tanked operations early in the morning. This was hard on the heels of United Airlines grounding its entire fleet after some routers decided to go flop bottom, messing up enterprise software which had been built to presume a better state of connectivity.
A day or so ago, NASA’s Pluto mission was in jeopardy as a software update they sent in anticipation of ramping up science data collection confused the probe, putting it in a safe mode (though now recovered.) At about the same time, Apple’s latest iOS 8.4 release bricked Home Sharing features on customer devices, to the consternation of a big part of their client base.
People ask what’s going on that our field can’t get software right anymore; it sure seems like it would have been a timely moment for our department to be seen as a re-emerging power in software quality…