9 of the Strangest Software Glitches Ever

Writing buggy applications is a cinch--for decades, the world's software developers have been proving that with just about every program they release. Truly interesting bugs, however, are a relatively rare breed. I'm talking about the kind that cause technology products and services to stop working for extended periods, or that prompt them to behave as if they were possessed or harbored grudges against the humans who use them. And even though the bugs themselves usually stem from mundane errors such as typos or faulty math, their symptoms are anything but boring.

For this story, I rounded up nine truly peculiar bugs that bedeviled customers of some of the largest providers of software and services on the planet. (I didn't cover ones with catastrophic side effects such as explosions or the death of human beings; Simson Garfinkel discusses some of those in this creepy good read at Wired.com. Of course, when it comes to bugs, Windows occupies a category of its own.