"Its failure could have resulted in a 1930s-style global financial and economic meltdown, with catastrophic implications for production, income and jobs,".

VOA: standard.2009.03.24

Because it says, your program will still give you a value, but it may not be what you intended, and you can't always tell, and that may propagate it's way down through a whole bunch of other computations before it causes some catastrophic failure.

因为这意味着，你的程序依然会返回一个值，但是这个值可能不是你想要的，你可能还分辨不出来，而且这种情况会传播,结果会沿着正果计算过程传播下去,直到产生一个灾难性的错误。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

That is what makes metal so fascinating, because metallic bonding allows the atoms to glide over one another without resulting in catastrophic failure.

所以这就使得金属具有了特别的性质，因为金属键使得原子可以,在彼此之间流动,而不会千万灾难性的后果。

麻省理工公开课 - 固态化学导论课程节选