I was responsible for a software bug that forced the entire United States Coast Guard to revert to using paper records to track all of their Aviation Logistics for an entire month. The bug was in an aircraft maintenance dashboard that had over a dozen filters on it. It passed a thorough round of QAing, but once in production it was found that a specific selection of filters would create an infinite loop in the report that would crash the system. With hundreds of mechanics using the dashboard, someone was triggering that selection of filters every two to three days.

It was a very rough month for me. When an emergency patch failed to solve the issue, management decided to take the whole system down (it was too big a release and had been in production too long to revert). User satisfaction surveys bottomed-out. There was discussion in upper-management about firing me, but my immediate supervisor defended me and pointed out that this required failure at many levels. When we got the system back online, they had to hire dozens of contractors to manually enter all the paper records into the system.

I continued to code for the Coast Guard for five more years, got a big promotion to Senior Developer at one point, and left the organization with much respect. Every once in a awhile someone would present a graph of user satisfaction surveys over the years and there would be that awful month where the graph bottomed out, but I could eventually smile about what that junior developer did.