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Case Study #231 — 329 Software Failure Events Timeline

Everbright Securities 'fat-finger' trading glitch

A software error at Chinese brokerage Everbright Securities triggered $1.14 billion in erroneous stock orders within seconds, briefly spiking the Shanghai Composite Index.

2013-08-16
When it happened
Finance
Sector
#231
Ranked by documented impact
01 — What Happened

The damage was public. The root cause was preventable.

A software error at Chinese brokerage Everbright Securities triggered $1.14 billion in erroneous stock orders within seconds, briefly spiking the Shanghai Composite Index.

Finance
Sector affected
2013-08-16
Date of the event
#231
Rank in the 329 Software Failure Events Timeline
1
Distinct root-cause clause identified below
02 — The Root Cause

What the software actually got wrong

A bug in a newly deployed order-generation and arbitrage system caused it to repeatedly resend the same buy orders instead of executing them once, flooding the market with unintended trades before the firm could halt the malfunctioning system.

01Root Cause

A bug in a newly deployed order-generation and arbitrage...

What Happened

A bug in a newly deployed order-generation and arbitrage system caused it to repeatedly resend the same buy orders instead of executing them once, flooding the market with unintended trades before the firm could halt the malfunctioning system.

How Requs AI Catches This

Requs AI Edge Case flags this exact pattern at the requirements and architecture stage — before a single line of code implementing it exists — so the assumption behind it gets challenged while it is still cheap to fix.

03 — How This Gets Caught Before It Happens

Beyond code coverage and "shall" testing

Root causes like this one rarely show up in code coverage or requirements-compliance testing, because nobody wrote a requirement anticipating the specific edge case that broke. Requs AI Edge Case and Requs AI Software FMEA are built to surface exactly this class of overlooked failure mode — before the software is written.

Requs AI Edge Case

Surfaces this before code exists

Identifies edge cases like this one at requirements and architecture time, using the Common Defect Enumeration to catalog failure patterns seen across hundreds of real-world software failures — including this one.

Requs AI Software FMEA

Connects the failure mode to the hazard

Traces this class of root cause directly to the system-level hazard it can produce, so a defect pattern like this one gets flagged during design review instead of after it ships.

Find the overlooked root causes before they ship.

Schedule a demonstration, or explore how Requs AI Edge Case and Software FMEA use the Common Defect Enumeration.

See real failures this would have caught

Failures like this one can be found before release. See how Requs AI finds them early: