Looking around on the wiki, I found this very interesting anecdote about the mission Mariner 1 . It was the 60s and the U.S. were in full space race and the Mariner 1 was the first probe to Venus was launched July 22, 1962, but soon left the probe curves change course and NASA was forced to explode to prevent damage more.
There was obviously an investigation to clarify what had happened and found the problem:
A missing hyphen in a line of code of a program in Fortran for automatic driving
The cost of this bug? Only 80 million dollars.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote many years later that the Mariner 1 was "destroyed by the most expensive hyphen in history"
then the next time your boss will be angry for our mistake, tell him that someone with much less did much worse! 
Mariner 1 launch.
Posted under Technology
This post WAS written by admin on November 24, 2008
It is not the only case: I can cite two probes to Mars space exploration program that are precipitated on the planet due to a software error, a test launch of the Ariane 5 rocket carrying communications satellites and weather that exploded due to a programming error, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier remained stranded in the Pacific Ocean during a battle simulation due to a programming error ... and there would be many more!