Code Curiosities

The Patriot Missile That Forgot How to Count

Episode Summary

In 1991, a software bug involving a clock that drifted by less than a third of a second killed 28 American soldiers in Dhahran — and the Pentagon had known about the flaw for months. This week we dig into how a rounding error buried deep in a weapons system became a fatal miscalculation, and why the patch arrived one day too late. It's a story about the terrifying gap between how humans think about time and how computers actually experience it.