Software doesn't always work out. Looking at the number of software failure screens in public places or that we encounter daily on the web or our mobile phones, it sometimes seems that software developers and organisations are the greatest producers of installation art around the planet.

What happens when software fails? We regard it as a normal and personal inconvenience when apps crash or servers become unavailable, but what are the implications beyond the individual user? Is software reliability simply a business decision or does it have economic, social and cultural consequences? What are the moral and practical implications for software developers? And when we talk of 'systems', are we part of the 'system'?

In this talk we will explore examples of failures in software and its application, and how such failures affect us at different scales, from user to society, from code to product management. Software failures can be entertaining or disastrous. They can also be instructive — there's a lot we can learn.