Oh, I saw the headline report on the news, but missed the actual report. So that's what it was.
A mate of mine used to work on flight control software for Aerospatiale, and, in the early days of Ariane, he went to mission control in Toulouse to watch a launch. On the wall was a map of the launch site in French Guiana, marked up with the splash points of past failures. Actually, they had a pretty good record for the Ariane series only 4/28 failures in series 1-3, and 4&5 have been very good, 7/185):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_2_and_Ariane_3The Proton has a pretty good record too (even if the fuel is a little unpleasant*...), so this was unusual. Interesting that it wasn't destroyed by range safety, but broke up and crashed.
* in the video, you can see that one of the engines has malfunctioned, and is spitting out unburnt dinitrogen tetroxide; the orange/brown gas (strictly, N2O4 doesn't burn, since it's the oxidant, not the fuel). I guess the flight control system is unable to correct for an engine failure of that magnitude.
