The idea that a single coding error could plunge an entire city into darkness is both fascinating and unsettling. It speaks to the fragility of our modern infrastructure, where vast systems—engineered to be resilient—can still be brought to their knees by something as seemingly insignificant as a misplaced line of code. History has shown us that such events are not merely theoretical; they have happened, with consequences ranging from temporary inconvenience to widespread chaos.  One of the most infamous examples occurred in 2015 when a software bug in the control systems of a major power distribution network caused a cascading failure, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without electricity for hours. The error itself was deceptively simple: a race condition in the logic that managed load distribution between substations. Under normal circumstances, redundancy protocols should have prevented a total collapse, but due to an oversight in the error-handling routine, the system misinterpreted an overload as a critical failure and began shutting down entire sections of the grid preemptively. What makes this scenario particularly striking is how easily it could have been avoided. The bug had been present in the system for months, undetected because it only manifested under very specific conditions—conditions that, by sheer coincidence, aligned perfectly on the day of the blackout. Post-mortem analysis revealed that the code had not been subjected to rigorous stress-testing, as engineers had assumed the existing safeguards were sufficient. This assumption proved catastrophic. The human cost of such failures cannot be overstated. Beyond the immediate disruption—traffic lights failing, hospitals switching to backup generators, businesses grinding to a halt—there is a deeper erosion of trust in the systems we rely on daily. If something as fundamental as electricity can be disrupted by a software glitch, what does that say about the stability of other critical infrastructure? Financial systems, water supplies, emergency communications—all of them run on code, and all of them are theoretically vulnerable to similar oversights. What lessons can be drawn from these events? First, that redundancy alone is not enough; systems must be designed with graceful degradation in mind, ensuring that even if one component fails, the rest can adapt rather than collapse. Second, rigorous testing under edge-case scenarios is not optional—it is a necessity. And finally, there must be a shift in how we perceive software errors in critical systems. They should not be dismissed as mere bugs, but treated as potential safety hazards, subject to the same scrutiny as structural flaws in a bridge or a skyscraper. The reality is that as our world becomes more interconnected, the ripple effects of even minor errors grow exponentially. A single mistake in a control system no longer affects just one machine or one facility—it can bring an entire city to a standstill. The challenge, then, is not just to write better code, but to build systems that acknowledge human fallibility and compensate for it. Because in the end, the weakest link in any infrastructure isn’t the technology—it’s the assumption that the technology will never fail.