Grace Hopper and her team at Harvard University recorded the very first actual computer bug in 1947 when a literal moth flew into the relays of the Mark II computer and caused a massive hardware failure.

A closer look

Grace Hopper and her team at Harvard University recorded the very first actual computer bug in 1947 when a literal moth flew into the relays of the Mark II computer and caused a massive hardware failure. They taped the dead insect into their logbook with the note documenting the first actual case of a bug being found, accidentally coining the most ubiquitous term in software engineering. Decades later, tech companies use this innocent 1940s moth as a convenient linguistic scapegoat to describe why their multi-billion-dollar application just crashed and deleted all your data. Calling it a bug sounds like an adorable little act of nature, rather than the reality, which is that a chronically sleep-deprived programmer forgot to add a semicolon on line four thousand