This type of hardware failure makes me glad to do software where the most damage that can happen is an unhappy customer, not a huge explosion. Also why I was glad to give up a chemistry career after nearly poisoning everyone in the building when the hood system failed.
What makes you think this couldn't be a software bug? Studying about bugs like Therac-25 [1] were standard practice at my school to show what it takes to make software an engineering discipline.
