Making mistakes is a natural part of the human experience. But not every mistake can be simply swept under the rug as it sometimes comes with a price 

Making mistakes is a natural part of the human experience. But not every mistake can be simply swept under the rug as it sometimes comes with a price tag---literally. Some of these human errors proved to be quite costly, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars that was impossible to recover. Below are five such instances that most likely led to a couple of facepalms. Hopefully, there’s a thing or two that we can all learn from these situations.  1. A Million Dollar Typo by Alitalia In 2006, a couple of missing zeroes led to Alitalia Airlines losing 7.7 million USD in ticket sales. What should’ve been 3900 USD for a business class flight from Toronto to Cyprus was accidentally printed as only 39 USD. Naturally, several people took advantage of this error, well 2000 of them to be exact. The airline initially refused to continue the tickets but later changed their mind. And just like that, 7.7 million USD went down the drain, all because of a pair of missing zeroes. 2. Never Throw Away Your Bitcoin Back in 2009, a man named “James Howell” decided to throw away the hard disk of his computer. No big deal except that there was 7500 Bitcoins stored in it. Over the years, Bitcoin rapidly gained traction with the public as more and more people started investing into it. And by 2013, James’ 7500 Bitcoins were now worth 3.5 million USD. Then by 2020, that value was now an impressive 70 million USD. Talk about regret, one that James no doubt thinks about everyday! 3. The Lottery In yet another case of making rash decisions, a woman in Central England came extremely close to claiming a jackpot of 183 million USD, the biggest lottery prize at the time. All she had to do was turn in the winning ticket. But when it was time to do that, the ticket was nowhere to be found. Turns out that her husband, for whatever reason, threw the lottery ticket into the trash only one day before the results were declared. Like James Howell, she too most likely cries about this situation to this very day. 4. London Millennium Bridge Between 1998 and 2000, the city of London spent a whopping £18.2 million on the construction of the famous London Millennium Footbridge over the River Thames. Everything seemed to be going fine, until opening day with thousands of people in attendance. The bridge immediately began swaying, forcing the government to shut it down for another two years to make modifications. Apparently, the engineers took into account the design, gravitational force and sea level, but forgot to include the force exerted by the people crossing the bridge. The company suffered a huge loss, having to spend an additional 6.3 million USD on reconstruction. 5. The Million Dollar Decimal Error For the Spanish Government, a misplaced decimal point cost them a loss of 11 million USD for a submarine that never worked. The submarine was supposed to weigh approximately 7.7 tonnes but somehow ended up at 77 tonnes. This was because one of the engineers accidentally shifted the decimal point, drastically changing the initial weight. The error was eventually caught on, but by then it was too late as the submarine was already completed. The Spanish Navy was then stuck with an unusable sub that had to be scrapped.

The Most Expensive Mistakes of All Time

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