catastrophic failure

基本解释

The cache must be nonvolatile to ensure that log data is protected in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as loss of power.
高速缓存必须是非易失的以确保在发生灾难性故障（例如停电）时保护日志数据。
Problems such as corrupt data on the disk, power failures, and system crashes can all cause catastrophic failure of the resizing process.
磁盘上的不可靠数据、电源故障、以及系统崩溃的等问题可能会导致调整过程发生灾难性故障。
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.
在增加额外的冗余层后，理论上，这种灾难性的系统失效的事故发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。
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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。
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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