I thought the first comment was pretty funny. "What about some enemy hacking into the software and uploading a virus? ... To me, this sounds like a case of too much technology and too little common sense...."

Seriously though, it seems they would have used a framework that wouldn't allow an error like that, especially if it was in just a few lines of code, to propagate to all of the systems. They definitely weren't using erlang (couldn't resist).