The assertion may have been unfounded, but I think it's just as unreasonable to assert the opposite. Bugs have cascading effects and in a sufficiently complex piece of software they can create chaos with unpredictable outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224707 has some discussion of the events, including the fact that the control design (where each pilot has an independent stick) was part of the problem. On a design like Boeing uses where both sets of controls move together, the experienced pilot would have noticed the less-experienced pilot pulling up on the stick because his own stick would be moving, and he would have said "No, nose down." And if they had nosed down to recover speed while still high enough in the air, they almost certainly could have regained control of the plane and saved 228 lives (including their own).
So in retrospect, I think my first sentence was wrong. The software did not glitch, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was pilot error that caused the initial stall, and multiple pilot errors that caused the failure to recover from the stall.
There may be examples of software error that has caused planes to fall out of the sky, but I don't know of any. The only plane crashes whose cause I know were due to hardware failure or pilot error, usually a combination of the two.