The difference here is that you treat one person at a time, and the bug doesn't get triggered every time. A bridge just happens to be used by a lot of people at the same time. The bridge didn't collapse three times until people figured out something was wrong.

This applies to the vast majority of fields where software is in use, except maybe planes, trains and nuclear power plants (where I sure as hell hope are a bunch of hardware safeguards in place). So in a sense, we software developers just got lucky here that our mistakes only kill one or very few at a time in most use cases (if at all).

It's still insane how according to the article they apparently just had that thing developed using emulated hardware with no proper security audits, safety guidelines or formal verification.