Indeed. The organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, Australia. (Hill, Norman and Beard, 1929; rebuilt Schantz, 2001)
Before a concert that I was sharing with a brass band, and while the band was warming up I was doing a dry run through some of my registration changes. On making a change, the organ burst into life, with a registration that was not the same as the one selected, and with a cluster of random notes. Turning the organ off stopped the noise, but on restarting the organ, and again trying a dry run, the same problem resulted in an even louder sound. Fortunately, the concert went ahead without a problem.
A year or so later, during a masterclass, a poor guinea pig was only a few bars into Vierne 1, first movement, when the same problem occurred. I'm not sure that the student has recovered.
Having worked with legacy embedded systems, and having been responsible for programming some, the nature of the beast does concern me. Typically, a contractor is brought in to design hardware, perhaps a different contractor to produce software, and when the project is 'finished' they move on. Support in such cases is always going to be very difficult. Tracking down intermittent faults that occur once every few months is a job for an extremely well paid consultant, and even then is not always successful. Even in-house design work has problems as staff change, and because they are often unable to afford to pay someone who has the expertise to track down obscure hardware, let alone software, problems. As well, the very art of designing the hardware and software in a fail-safe system is typically not taught to CS or EE students, and there have been some very embarrassing cases of multi-million dollar designs for mission critical systems having to be scrapped because they did fail and fixing the problem was no longer an option.
How much more difficult is it then for a system that has to fit within the cost constrains of an organ? And, what is going to happen when a critical part fails and replacements are not available? Or the tools use to produce the firmware don't work on the latest computer systems? These do happen, leaving expensive systems unable to operate.
In the case of the Melbourne Town Hall, the rebuild is reported to have cost AUD 4.5 million (about 2.8 million euro), but there appears to be a decided lack of enthusiasm for encouraging the firm that rebuilt the organ to fix the problem.
I was aware, in the 1980s, there were problems with the electronics of the organ in the Sydney Opera House. I can remember the zylophone playing on every second note, even though I hadn't drawn the stop, for example.
The old engineering philosophy of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) is valid. I prefer real pieces of wood connected my keys to my pallets!