Just to clarify for others because it’s a tiny bit clickbaity:

The Patriot missile didn’t kill 28 people accidentally, it simply failed to intercept an enemy missile.

And it wasn’t launched on an incorrect trajectory either, the radar was looking at a slightly wrong distance window and lost track. Furthermore, the error only starts having an effect after 100 hours of operation, and it seems to have only been problematic with the faster missiles in Iraq that the system wasn’t designed for. They rushed the update and they did actually write a function to deal with this exact numerical issue, but during the refactor they missed one place where it should have been used.

28 lives are obviously significant, but just to note that there are many mitigating factors.