catastrophic failure

基本解釋

The cache must be nonvolatile to ensure that log data is protected in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as loss of power.
高速緩存必須是非易失的以確保在發(fā)生災(zāi)難性故障（例如停電）時保護日志數(shù)據(jù)。
Problems such as corrupt data on the disk, power failures, and system crashes can all cause catastrophic failure of the resizing process.
磁盤上的不可靠數(shù)據(jù)、電源故障、以及系統(tǒng)崩潰的等問題可能會導(dǎo)致調(diào)整過程發(fā)生災(zāi)難性故障。
By adding extra layers of redundancy, the probability of such a catastrophic failure can -- in theory at least -- be made too small to worry about.
在增加額外的冗余層后，理論上，這種災(zāi)難性的系統(tǒng)失效的事故發(fā)生的可能性就非常非常小了。

"Its failure could have resulted in a 1930s-style global financial and economic meltdown, with catastrophic implications for production, income and jobs,".
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.
因為這意味著，你的程序依然會返回一個值，但是這個值可能不是你想要的，你可能還分辨不出來，而且這種情況會傳播,結(jié)果會沿著正果計算過程傳播下去,直到產(chǎn)生一個災(zāi)難性的錯誤。
麻省理工公開課 - 計算機科學(xué)及編程導(dǎo)論課程節(jié)選
That is what makes metal so fascinating, because metallic bonding allows the atoms to glide over one another without resulting in catastrophic failure.
所以這就使得金屬具有了特別的性質(zhì)，因為金屬鍵使得原子可以,在彼此之間流動,而不會千萬災(zāi)難性的后果。
麻省理工公開課 - 固態(tài)化學(xué)導(dǎo)論課程節(jié)選

Yet the record will prove that active management is a catastrophic failure to achieve that goal.
FORBES: Playing With Active Money Managment Is A Losing Game