I was not around when it happened, but on the 15th of August 2010, a huge bug was found in the code by Jeff Garzik, where 184 billion coins was created out of thin air. < Block 74638 > The two Core developers Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto quickly purged the 184 billion BTC transaction from block 74638 and the bug was fixed.
I think, if nobody spotted that quickly, we would have had a lot more problems and the whole experiment would have failed. Who would have trusted a currency, if hackers could create billions of coins out of thin air?
That said, we do not even worry much about the millions of toilet paper money that are printed by government each day.