the Knight Capital glitch

programmingops culture

The 2012 trading firm that lost about 440 million dollars in 45 minutes from a botched software deployment.

An engineer failed to copy new code to one of eight servers, and a reused feature flag reactivated long-dead test logic that fired millions of unintended orders into the market. The loss nearly bankrupted the firm within the hour - the definitive cautionary tale about deployment hygiene and dead code left in place.

Also known as: Knightmare, Knight Capital, $440 million

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