If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today (2012)

The problem they had was that someone entered a zero in a form field that was not allowed to be zero. The application that received this zero used it as the denominator in a divide, and so incurred a divide by zero exception.

That application did not have a divide by zero handler, and so NT did the same thing pretty much every operating system does in that case, and it killed the application.

That application happened to be vital for engine operation, and so the ship was dead in the water and had to be towed to port.

It might seem shocking that they did not enforce important rules like "this field cannot be zero" on the data entry form, or that they did not handle divide by zero exceptions in a mission critical application (or at least have a procedure for restarting the application if it died), but this ship was a testbed for experimental software so maybe those things get added later, once they have determined that the new system works well enough to continue developing?

At least, I hope it was something like that, and not something like the subcontractor who did the data entry terminals thought the application would do the data validation, and the subcontractor who did the application thought the terminals would do it.