Ever clicked the send button on a WhatsApp before realising that your autocorrect did something weird to what you were trying to say?

It can get pretty embarrassing.

Not as embarrassing – or as disastrous – as the typos on the list that follows.

The Australian Financial Review reports on 12 times that small mistakes amounted to colossal disasters.

Here are our top five picks:

1. A NASA rocket exploded in 1962 due to a misplaced hyphen

Mariner 1 launched on July 22, 1962. It was supposed to do an unmanned fly-by of Venus to collect scientific data, but an error in the computer codes caused it to fly off course.

As it turns out, a misplaced hyphen seems to have caused the rocket’s trajectory to be off. A NASA range-safety officer wanted to avoid any possible crashes back down to Earth, so 293 seconds into the launch, he blew it up.

That coding blunder cost NASA roughly R10 billion.

2. The loss of $617 billion at the Tokyo Stock Exchange

In 2014, one of the biggest “fat finger” errors (accidentally typing something) caused the loss of $617 billion in stocks on the trading floor of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

A trader accidentally pressed the wrong button, cancelling stock sales adding up to 67.78 trillion yen. Forty-two separate transactions were canceled, which is why the price tag was so massive.

The mistake was attributed to “working under intense pressure”.

3. A Google forward slash error broke the internet for a day

On January 31, 2009, the internet didn’t work properly.

If anyone tried logging onto a website, an error message from Google said “Warning! This site may harm your computer.” Google’s fumble happened when someone added “/” to a list of harmful sites. For some reason, the trigger for this error message was the forward slash key. Since every website includes a forward slash in there somewhere, every website was considered harmful to computers.

People obviously freaked out and went to Stopbadware.org, which quickly crashed due to the sudden flow of traffic. Google fixed the problem that same day, but not before mass panic.

4. Deutsche Bank accidentally gave a hedge fund $6 billion because of its antiquated computers

One of Deutsche Bank’s clients, a hedge fund, received an unexpected payday.

The payment was the result of a mistake by a bank employee. Deutsche Bank’s internal systems were also to blame, however. Their CEO, John Cryan, said in a statement that “Our cost base is swollen by poor and ineffective processes, antiquated and inadequate technology.”

The hedge fund returned the money, averting the crisis.

5. An Excel error led to the London Whale debacle

The ‘London Whale’ is the nickname given to the guy who apparently lost JPMorgan Chase & Co. $6,2 billion in stocks in 2012, all because of a simple error.

According to a later report after the incident, Microsoft Excel was blamed for the Whale’s flub. A spreadsheet was used by the company to organize its Value at Risk model, which was in turn copy-and-pasted onto another table manually. This meant that an error in Excel led to a massive loss for the company.

They ended up making a record profit of $21,3 billion in 2012, so things could have been worse.

You read about the remaining seven here.

[source:financialreview]