Top 8 Most Expensive Mistakes in History

The Millennium Bridge

5 Millions


The Millennium Bridge, which connects the two banks of the River Thames in London, opened in 2000 but soon had to be closed. The problem was that the bridge, in the face of the traffic of large numbers of people, shook dangerously, and endangered people's lives. To the initial cost of the work, which exceeded 18.2 million pounds sterling, it was necessary to add 5 million to carry out the reconstruction and leave the site safe.



An error in airline tickets

7.2 Millions


In 2006, the largest Italian airline at the time advertised long-haul business class flights from Toronto to Cyprus at a price too good to be true, of only $39.Predictably, travelers rushed to book their seats on these ultra-cheap flights, but it turned out that someone at the airline had made a mistake, as the trip should have cost $3900.



Bitcoins thrown in the trash

7.5 millions


In 2009, bitcoins had just appeared on the market, and Englishman James Howells, managed to accumulate 7,500 digital currencies. At the time, they were worth almost nothing. But in 2013, the value of these coins increased greatly, reaching 7.5 million dollars. When the young man realized this, he found that it was too late – the hard drive with his bitcoins had been thrown in the trash.




Spanish Army submarine

11 millions


At the time, a submarine was being built for the Spanish Navy, but that submarine never worked for the Spanish Navy. The submarine's fixed weight was about 7.7 tons, but one of the engineers made a mathematical error or decimal point error. The engineer removed the decimals from the number and printed the weight of about 77 tons. After the mistake was acknowledged, the Spanish government faced a loss of $11 million to recover.



Building collapse in Shanghai

 30 millions



The Lotus Riverside residential complex in Shanghai, China, housed 11 tall buildings. One day, one of the 13-story buildings collapsed. By miracle, none of the neighboring blocks were hit. The cause of the fall was the non-compliance with building standards, in addition to the deficiency in the bases of the construction.





SNCF ordered the wrong trains

50 millions


The error was detected when it was realised that the purchased trains were too wide for most platforms at French regional stations, but the railway operator could no longer obtain a refund. Construction work to widen station platforms had to be added to the cost of this already expensive nonsense so that the new trains could pass.




A code error destroyed a NASA rocket

80 millions


NASA bosses had decided that Mariner 1 would make a flight of Venus, however, no one was prepared for what happened next, 5 minutes after launch, Mariner 1 exploded, and $80 million of the U.S. government budget quickly faded away. When NASA bosses investigated what caused the problem, we bet they wanted to slap it in the face, the omission of a single hyphen embedded in Mariner 1's code




Ruinous sale on the stock exchange

225 million 



Japanese company Mizuho Securities wanted to sell a share on the Tokyo Stock Exchange for 610,000 yen (approximately $5,000). Someone got it wrong when it came to entering the data, and put 610,000 shares up for sale for just 1 yen. Despite the company's protests, the stock exchange followed up on the request, which caused losses of approximately $225 million




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