It's not the first time that any huge defects have been caused by a single character. Quoting
Code Complete who in turned was referencing an article from the early 80's (Kill that Code, Gerald Weinberg), "...three of the most expensive software errors of all time-costing $1.8 billion, $900 million and $245 million- involved the change of a
single character in a previously correct program.
So on the one hand, it's easy to sort of snicker that they were so close to having a correct implementation, but just missed, but on the other hand, there is a long and storied history of us programmers blowing things by a single character. I mean, isn't the 'off by one' error still one of the most common ones in development code, a instead of =, index instead of index-1 or whatever?
At least now that the defect has been isolated and can be fixed. One character fix is much better than a full redesign...