Ever wonder why your phone battery dies faster in winter, or how Netflix knows exactly what you want to watch? Code Curiosities dives into the fascinating stories behind the tech we use every day, revealing the surprising science and clever engineering that makes our digital world tick.
In 2021, a single accidental keystroke by one engineer at Facebook wiped Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook off the map for 3.5 billion people — and the fix took six hours because the digital 'key' to get back inside the building was locked inside the building. This week, we pull apart the surprisingly fragile plumbing that holds the internet together: the Border Gateway Protocol, a 30-year-old routing system sketched on a napkin that still directs nearly all global web traffic today.
30 Sept 2026
The Midnight Glitch That Reset a Country's Clocks
In 2011, a single software update pushed by a sleep-deprived engineer caused thousands of Qantas flights to display the wrong time — but that's just the surface. Buried inside this story is the surprisingly fragile way computers actually track time, a 50-year-old compromise called Unix Time, and why on January 19, 2038, your devices might think it's 1970 all over again. Last episode we talked about a single email that broke the internet's trust — this week, we're talking about how the internet can't even agree on what time it is.
28 Sept 2026
The Typo That Launched a Thousand Spam Folders
In 1978, a man named Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited promotional email to 393 people on ARPANET — and the internet has never quite forgiven him for it. But the real story isn't about one overeager marketer; it's about the surprisingly fragile, handshake-based system of trust that early internet pioneers assumed would just... work, and what we lost when it didn't. Turns out the reason your mom's email about a Nigerian prince ends up next to your bank statement has roots older than the personal computer.
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