Here’s this year complete technology fails

For many, 2021 was a mix of hopeful and challenging, as covid vaccines became more widely available but the pandemic dragged on for another year. And while technology continued to keep us entertained and connected during the pandemic, it also made our lives harder.

There were times this year when technology misfired or failed to work entirely — from giant internet outages and crippling ransomware attacks to a series of issues for Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. (So many, in fact, it’s the one company we list twice here.)

Here is this year’s list of some of the most noteworthy tech-tastrophes of 2021:

Facebook and LinkedIn experience massive data leaks

In April, cybersecurity experts said the personal information of half a billion Facebook users, including phone numbers, birthdays and email addresses, had been posted to a website used by hackers. Facebook said at the time that the same data had previously been reported as scraped from peoples’ profiles by “malicious actors” in 2019 — and the issue that made it possible was fixed the same year. The incident showed yet again how vulnerable companies collecting massive amounts of personal data can be too bad actors.

Also in April, LinkedIn confirmed that publicly-available details scraped from about 500 million of its users’ profiles had been offered for sale on a hacker website. Linkedin said at the time that the database for sale was “actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.” The company also said it was “not a LinkedIn data breach.”

Citizen app misidentifies citizen

In May, Citizen, a startup whose app sends real-time crime alerts, offered a $30,000 (AED110,190) reward for help determining who started a Los Angeles wildfire. Tips, including a photo of a man posted to Signal, led police to detain a suspect. There was just one (very big) problem: it turned out he had been identified by mistake.

The company had used a new product in its app called OnAir to broadcast the information about the suspect but said it failed to follow its own verification protocols before circulating the information.

Two outages (briefly) take down much of the internet

It happened twice in less than two weeks: Large swaths of the internet went down, felled by outages at tech companies that most people have never even heard of. The outages were quickly detected and short-lived, but they underscored how reliant we are on the internet, and how precarious it can be.

First, on June 8, countless websites went dark due to an outage at content delivery network Fastly. Then, on June 17, an issue at a similar company, Akamai Technologies, broke websites including those belonging to Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The Fastly outage was spotted within a minute and lasted less than an hour for most affected websites, while Akamai let customers know of the problem within seconds and was able to fix it within four hours (and the company said most affected customers were offline for just minutes).

These weren’t the only big internet failures of the year: In December, Amazon’s cloud computing service suffered three outages that led to issues for Disney+, Slack, Netflix, Hulu, and many others. It also disrupted Amazon’s logistics operations during the all-important holiday season.

Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

October 4, was awful on many fronts for the company that would soon be re-named, Meta.

A major outage shut down Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram for hours, which it blamed on “configuration changes.” Its stock plunged in trading as the company contended with the duelling issues of an outage and blowback from Haugen’s television appearance.

Zillow learns a hard lesson about estimating home prices with AI

In November, Zillow announced it would shut down its home-flipping business, Zillow Offers, citing “unpredictability in forecasting home prices” that “far exceeds” what the company had expected.

The news was a stunning admission of defeat for the real estate listing company, which took a $304 million (AED1 b) inventory write-down in the third quarter, saw its stock plunge, and said it planned to cut 2,000 jobs — a quarter of its staff.

But it also marked a stark turnaround from earlier in the year, when the company appeared so confident in its ability to use AI to estimate home values that it had said its so-called “Zestimate” would, for certain homes, act as an initial cash offer to buy a property. It’s not just hard to buy and sell homes for profit, apparently; it’s really tricky to use AI to make such real-world decisions, too.

Tesla “full self-driving” freaks out drivers 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long touted the electric-vehicle company’s “full self-driving” software. By late 2021, however, it’s still not fully autonomous — rather, it offers driver-assist features that require users to agree that they must remain alert at the steering wheel in case they need to take over. Additionally, only a small number of Tesla drivers have been able to try it out thus far, including a group of customers who’ve paid $10,000 (AED36,730) apiece for access to the “beta” version of the feature.

And while the feature may sound fantastical, drivers who’ve used it said in November that, beyond the wow factor, they are often unsure of what their cars will do next —a terrifying prospect when you’re behind the wheel of a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds.

Source: Agencies