The Most Embarrassing Tech Fails in History

McDonald's faced a humorous tech fail with an AI ordering system that confused customers' orders, leading to absurd combinations and excessive food.

### The Most Embarrassing Tech Fails: From AI Ordering Mishaps to Y2K Panic
* 🍟 In 2021, McDonald's partnered with IBM to trial an AI voice ordering system, which hilariously mismanaged orders, leading to customers receiving **hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets** and bizarre food combinations like **ice cream with bacon**.
* ⌨ The 2005 Optimus Maximus keyboard, featuring **113 OLED displays per key**, was a tech marvel that failed due to **poor typing experience** and a hefty **$1,500 price tag**, ultimately resulting in **low sales** despite initial excitement.
* 💩 Paul and Rachel Baron’s washable swim nappy business thrived until a **used diaper was mistakenly sent by Amazon**, leading to a **disastrous review that tanked their sales** and left them **$600,000 in debt**.
* 💻 The XO laptop, created by the One Laptop per Child initiative in 2005, promised **affordable education for children** but fell short with a **broken hand crank** and a launch price of **$130**, leading to skepticism about its **effectiveness**.
* 📉 The Rabbit R1, a personal tech device, was plagued with issues like **poor battery life and security vulnerabilities**, causing many to question its necessity when similar functions could be performed by **smartphones**.
* 📱 HP's Touchpad, launched in 2011, was a **colossal failure** against the iPad, leading to its withdrawal from the market just **48 days after launch** due to **poor performance and lack of consumer interest**.
* 🦠 The Morris worm of 1988 infected **6,000 computers** and led to the **first prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act**, highlighting the **urgent need for improved cybersecurity measures**.
* 🚀 The Mariner 1 probe's failure to reach Venus was due to a **simple software error**, resulting in a **$192 million loss** and proving how **critical accuracy in programming can be**.
* 🗓 The Y2K bug caused widespread panic and an estimated **$200 to $600 billion in preventative spending**, as many feared a tech apocalypse that ultimately resulted in **minor issues** but demonstrated the **importance of foresight in technology**.

prepare yourself for 13 of the most embarrassing tech fails of all time, from the keyboard with 113 OLED displays inside of it to PlayStation's most expensive mistake ever in history to literal global apocalypse. Starting with McDonald's, who in one of the weirdest collabs of all time went into partnership with IBM in 2021 to run a trial of an AI-assisted voice ordering system at about 100 of their drive-throughs. Guess what happened when TikTok got their hands on it? Giving orders to the wrong cars, multiplying items, and I'm not talking someone walking away with a single extra chicken nugget. People were leaving with hundreds of dollars worth of nuggets. And I think the most embarrassing and yet at the same time also the most we probably should have seen this coming era, giving people ridiculous combinations of products that any human would realize make no sense at all, like ice cream with ketchup and butter, or I really wish I was joking, ice cream with bacon on top. But hey, at least that means the

McDonald's ice cream machine was actually working for once, all while having the audacity to correct the pronunciation of its customers and that says it's caramel like huh. So yeah, McDonald's basically had to end the trial ASAP, but we got some pretty good laughs out of it. A pretty harmless 1 out of 10 fail. The same can't be said for number 12 though because in 2005, an unknown Russian design company called Art lebedev released a series of concept images for a revolutionary new type of keyboard, a keyboard called the Optimus Maximus, which yeah, that's a pretty sick name, where each individual key has its own tiny display and that's kind of amazing because it means every single key can be whatever you want it to be. So let's say I get a little bored of the normal QWERTY keyboard layout, bam, and it's kind of mind-frying just the power that this gives you. Every single key can be a letter, a number, a direct shortcut to a Photoshop tool, or your ultimate

moving League. It's kind of like the MacBook touch bar but useful. You could change your whole keyboard's language with one press, and there's even a programmable side panel which could allow you to fast swap between applications. Now, you might be thinking in 2005, surely that kind of miniaturized LCD display technology just wasn't there at the time, and you would be right. This was meant to be a concept, but people just got so excited by it that Lebedev decided this is our chance to do something big. We actually have to make this thing. They quickly realized that LCD displays at the time were too dim for what they wanted to do, so they decided to go with OLED tech. That wasn't really a big thing yet in 2005, especially in such a tiny form, which means that as well as having to make a monster of a keyboard, they also ended up having to create their own proprietary miniature OLED display technology just so they could fit one of them under each one of these transparent keys, which they

did by working with a Taiwanese supplier called ID display, and somehow after all of that, they actually managed to ship a working product in 2008. Sadly, they got too caught up in the hype themselves. This company became so obsessed with achieving this goal of 113 OLED displays that they forgot to actually make the typing experience good. These keys have such high resistance that you're just tired after like a minute of using it. Oh yeah, and the thing was priced at $1,500 when it launched, so only a very small fraction of the people who first expressed interest actually followed through and bought the thing. I'm only going to give this a 2 out of 10 fail though because there was a silver lining. Remember I display? Well, they put so much time and effort into helping to create this mini under keyboard OLED Tech that they decided to run with it anyway, and they were eventually purchased by Elgato, which is what led to the Elgato stream deck, which even today is one of the must-have gadgets for any streamer. But not

every story has a happy ending; some of them have a nappy ending. This is Paul and Rachel Baron, who, after being completely unable to find a washable swim nappy for their son that was actually good and actually fit, decided to make their own. They started a company called Bow and Bell Littles, selling them on Amazon, and very quickly hit $1 million in sales. These guys were killing it; they were appearing on shows; they were being profiled by Forbes. But four years ago, possibly the absolute worst thing that could have happened happened. Amazon, you know, the nearly $2 trillion technology company, sent one customer a used diaper, and you bet that customer left a review. The diaper arrived used and was covered in poop stains. Nothing could have been more disgusting. These were not small stains either. I was extremely grossed out. Now, this sticky situation was nothing to do with the Barons. This happened because the person at Amazon responsible for checking returned products before sending them out to new customers did a, well, a pant job. But the worst part of this is after

the Barons saw this review, and they scurried to tell Amazon that it wasn't their fault that it could very heavily damage their business and to take it down. Amazon refused, and the Barons were right. This one review did completely tank their business. Four years later, they're now $600,000 in debt, including a loan that has their house up as collateral. It's only after Bloomberg published an article about the holder barkle that Amazon finally agreed to take the review down, but the damage was already done. So, four out of ten fail, made worse by the fact that it wasn't even these guys' fault. So, if you ever find yourself in the market for a washable swim nappy, now you know where to go. Just maybe don't return it after you've used it. Okay, we've seen all sorts of laptops over the years: super high-end gaming laptops, super affordable $400 laptops. But what on Earth does a $100 laptop look like? Well, in 2005, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negron, formed

one laptop per child, a nonprofit whose goal was to transform education in the developing world by creating and distributing as many devices as possible to children in schools, and the device that was going to change children's lives, the XO, a quirky little green plastic laptop designed to be produced as cheaply as possible while still giving disadvantaged kids access to a computer. And this thing had a lot of thoughtful features packed into it for its tiny cost, especially considering this was 2005. A hand crank that would allow children to power their device even if they didn't have access to an electrical outlet, which means that the device ran on a tiny fraction of the power of probably whatever you're watching this on, and that was crucial to allow kids to use it outside of school. The screen could flip around to turn it into an eReader. The thing was made of shock-absorbing plastic and rubber, a feature that Negron clearly very much enjoyed showing off. A rubberized spill-proof keyboard, as well as all the ports being

covered by the Wi-Fi antenna when closed, all with a logo in various colors so that kids could tell their laptops apart. And the absolute core of the whole thing was that the device ran on a Linux-based operating system, giving kids total access to the computer. The organization actually managed to gather so much steam that they were even offered free Mac OS licenses by Steve Jobs himself, which that never happens. But Negron turned them down just to keep the system as open as possible. All this for only $100, and they didn't even want to stop there. We really believe that we can make literally hundreds of millions of these machines available to children around the world, Negron promised. And it's not just $100; it's going to go lower. If you're thinking this is too good to be true, good instincts, and people started to pick up on this when the crank broke off at the live demo. Not a great start, and by the time the laptop actually came out, a lot of these promises had just mysteriously vanished. There was no crank.

Although I guess you can kind of see why it wasn't as durable as promised. The SSD only had 1 gigabyte of storage. The screen was terrible, and the worst part of it was this whole project was geared around this being the $100 laptop. But even with all of these quality cuts, they only managed to get the launch price down to $130, which then went up to $180 in the next revision. So by the end of this all, the critics were convinced that the money that had been put into this project would have been far better spent on things that people in developing nations actually want to need, like, you know, better schools and clean drinking water. 4 out of 10 fail. Now do you remember this little guy? This alongside the Humane AI pin were literally supposed to be the next step in the evolution of personal tech after the smartphone. Thanks to something called the large action model, an AI system that cannot just talk to you but also perform actions based on what you say. Like, for example, communicate completely on your

behalf with flights and hotels to book your entire holiday from just you saying a couple of words, which excited enough people to make $1 million in the first 5 days alone. But spoiler alert, no one would ever trust it to do that because the rabbit R1 sucks. The battery sucks. It requires its own SIM card if you want to use it on the go, and this thing suffered from some major security vulnerabilities from launch that rabbit basically ignored. But the most fundamental, it wasn't needed. Everything this thing does can already be done completely on your smartphone, as well as a whole load of things that this can't, which led a lot of people to ask the question, Sure, the teenage engineering design device housing does look really cool, but shouldn't this just be an app? Well, turns out it actually is. Android authorities Michel Ramen managed to download rabbit's Launcher APK onto a Google Pixel 6A and got it to run the entire R1 experience, which really does make this device the final boss of this meeting could have been an email, and in

a similar vein of companies biting off more than they could chew. My God, you know Hewlett-Packard or HP. If so, in all likelihood, it's because you've used one of their PCs in your school computer room or the library because they're affordable and they do the job. They're not exactly the company you think of as the front runners of consumer technology. However, in 2011, one year after the release of the iPad, HP decided it was their time to shine. They wanted to take on Apple with the HP Touchpad, and HP weren't stupid enough to just try and beat at their own game. They promised something different because their tablet used the webOS operating system, built on the same tech as a lot of web browsers. The Touchpad promised to be a more open and customizable experience than Apple's walled garden approach while also maintaining some of the style and flair that Apple's known for, which I think is fair to say was lacking in most Android devices at the time. And because webOS was based on common web

technology. It was supposed to be super developer-friendly too. Now, this was a very expensive move because HP had to acquire Palm, who made webOS, for close your eyes $1.2 billion. So, I'm sure everyone at the company was just praying that this would pay off. Oh God, there is absolutely no competition between how slick and intuitive the iPad interface is versus this. The touchpad was pretty universally recognized as a much slower, much clunkier, and significantly bulkier iPad. Nobody wanted this thing. And you know what makes it particularly embarrassing? The HP was already worse than the original iPad, with it being so buggy on top of everything else. But to finish it all off, by the time this touchpad had actually come out, Apple had just launched this, the iPad 2, which absolutely decimated the thing. This product was performing so poorly, both in terms of sales and customer experience, even after slashing the price by $100, that HP literally took it off the market after only 48 days. They even had to refund retailers for the stock they

purchased practically soiling everyone's perception of the whole company while burning through a hell of a lot of cash while they were at it. 5 out of 10. Now for number seven, we actually have to go all the way back to 1988 before the worldwide web, if you can even imagine such a thing. We're talking about a time where only 60,000 computers across fewer than 20 countries were connected to the internet, which was only used by universities, research centers, and government bodies. But then in November that year, a malicious self-replicating worm program was released from a computer at MIT, and 24 hours later, 6,000 of those 60,000 computers had been infected. And let's be very clear, computers in very important places, including major universities like Berkeley and Harvard, and even NASA. The worm used a back door in the email systems to get into these computers, which wasn't very hard. Computers at this stage, they were not ready for internet trolls, and while it

didn't destroy any files. It rendered those systems practically unusable. Emails were delayed for days, and functions at vital institutions, including, by the way, the military, were blocked, leading to all sorts of key infrastructure having to either wipe their systems or take them offline for over a week in an attempt to rid themselves of the worm. We are talking up to millions of dollars of damage, with obviously the potential for much bigger consequences. Here's where it gets really interesting. Seeing the damage it had caused, an anonymous programmer admitted to two friends that he was the one who created the worm, but that he hadn't intended it to spiral this much out of control. He asked one of the friends to send an anonymous message across the internet, which included both apologies and instructions on how to remove the worm. But ironically, few people actually saw this because of the extent of the network damage. The other friend went to the New York Times to try and do some damage control, telling them that the worm was meant to be a harmless experiment but accidentally revealed the

programmer's identity by well. It wasn't very smart using his initials, which were easily searchable at his university. So, the New York Times found and outed the culprit, 23-year-old Robert Tapen Morris. And then the FBI got involved. They quickly launched an investigation and found plenty of incriminating evidence, which was used to prosecute him in 1989. And the reason this was so momentous is that Morris was the first person to ever be indicted under U.S. Congress's new 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Silver lining, though. This was the wake-up call for global cybersecurity. Only a few days after this attack, the U.S. Department of Defense set up America's first computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh. And now that they've woken up, here is how Bit Defender's new scam co-pilot, our sponsor, can help you to avoid the same embarrassment. So, this right here is a scam website. They steal your data, they take your money, and you don't get the products you've paid for. But equally, how on Earth would you know?

this is how. So, my phone has the Bit Defender scam co-pilot baked into it, which means that when I try and load up that same page, it will stop me: Dangerous page blocked for your protection. And it's not just for your browser. This thing protects everything. Like, for example, Bit Defender now pre-checks every single email and text as they come in for scam and phishing attempts before I even need to think about clicking them. And there is a lot more, including a live chat that lets you check just about anything else that might look a little dodgy that you're concerned about interacting with. Link below to get yourself the Bit Defender scam co-pilot now. At least the Morris worm issues were resolved in the end, though. The Tesla Cybertruck, on the other hand, has just been one continuous rocky road of problems ever since its very inception, where the bulletproof windows smashed during a demo to show how bulletproof they were. But who would have thought that that wouldn't even be its biggest issue? 'Cause now the thing's actually

out this thing has been recalled five times just this year. January for a warning light font size that was too small. Not something I ever considered before, but absolutely a real danger. But thankfully, they managed to fix this one remotely with an update. April for a dodgy accelerator pedal which could dislodge from its pad if pushed too hard, getting stuck on the throttle, which if you think about it is as bad as an issue can get on a car. In June, Tesla had to issue two recalls on the same day because of faulty windshield wipers. I mean, who would have guessed that the Cybertruck's bizarre single 4T long wiper might not work perfectly? It was failing due to excessive electrical current, requiring the entire motor to be replaced. And then one for the slique, the long strip of plastic lining on top of the sides of the bed, which was poorly installed on some vehicles and has fallen off in at least two cases, creating a road hazard that very much has the potential to be deadly. And then finally in October due

to a software issue that delays or prevents the rearview camera from showing you its feed. The result: over 27,000 Cybertrucks have been recalled. That's basically every Cybertruck ever made. And as of July the 8th, Tesla has also been offering free motor replacements. They said it's not dangerous to drive with the old one, and they haven't officially called this a recall. But given that so far the Cybertruck has given people all the confidence of a wet paper bag with wheels on it, I don't know how many people are going to believe that. This smells like a six out of ten fail to me. And now we're in the top five. Now it just goes from bad to worse. Have you heard of Concord? I'm going to guess you haven't, and that's part of the problem. See, Concord is a video game that should have gone gangbusters. It was a hero shooter, one of the most popular genres in gaming history. It was developed by ex-Bungie staff, you know the

people who worked on the very successful Destiny 2, and it was a PlayStation Studios game, meaning that it's published by PlayStation themselves. And refreshingly, it was going to be a one-time $40 purchase with no battle pass or microtransactions. So, what could go wrong? Well, as soon as the first trailer dropped, people immediately lost interest, and that includes me. I was watching the PlayStation event live when they announced this, like, What did I just see? Sure, we love a good hero shooter, but ever since Overwatch exploded onto the scene in 2016, the entire industry has just been pumping out clones of that game that basically do nothing new. So, we're at a stage now in 2024 where people are very fatigued of the genre, but that's far from the full deal because the character designs were boring and also particularly aesthetically unappealing, which sounds silly, but a genre like this actually needs players to want to look like the heroes they're playing as, especially since this entire genre revolves around

unlockable skins that you want to be desirable to keep players playing. The 70s sci-fi aesthetic just wasn't resonating with kids who were born 30 years later, let alone the fact that it just made the entire world look like a knockoff Guardians of the Galaxy without the charm. And arguably the biggest problem: Sony really failed to market the game at all. Like, this first TR trailer was 3 months before the release of the game, which is probably why you've never heard of it. Even so, I don't think anyone expected just how badly this game would perform. Concord launched in August 2024, and want to guess how many concurrent players that it had at its absolute peak on Steam? To give you an idea, Counter Strike 2 has nearly 2 million players. Concord, 697. And you know what makes it many times worse? Concord's been in development for 8 years. And you might be thinking, well, surely that means the game is going to be good. And according to reviews, it actually was at least fun to

play, but what happened 8 years ago? OverWatch. This thing is so clearly yet another copycat trying to cash in on the genre, except unlike games like Paladins or Valorant, which have their own twists. This game took so long to make that it's both completely missed the hero shooter hype window while being based on the Gen one product that in itself is now outdated. I mean, OverWatch 2 is already out now, and even that is struggling. But the single most embarrassing part of this misadventure is that Sony saw Concord's poultry player numbers and decided that instead of giving this game a chance, trying something new with the marketing, like, I don't know, just off the top of my head, telling people the game existed, that they would shut the servers down forever after 2 weeks of them being live. They invested a rumored $400 million into developing this thing, which would make Concord easily PlayStation's most expensive game ever. Even The Last of Us Part II only cost them $220 million, although there are other rumors saying that this

was closer to 150 million, but either way, surely it was worth just risking a little bit extra just in case they could scrape some of that back. Easy 6 out of 10 disaster here that didn't sound good, and now you can just get ready to lose all trust entirely in the ability of big companies to actually look after you, starting with the snowflake hack. So, Snowflake is a high-security cloud storage provider with over 9,800 corporate customers, including giants like S Tere, Ticket Master, and AT&T. So, all of these massive companies will store their customers' private data using Snowflake, and all three of those companies were affected when a hacking group compromised Snowflake in April. The hacker group who call themselves the Shiny Hunters, which is another name for people who spend hundreds of hours in the Pokémon games searching for rare shiny versions of them, got straight into the company Snowflake accounts, stole the data in them with the intention to sell that data off. They used info-stealing malware programs to infect systems, not

owned by snow themselves, but likely devices owned by snowflakes customers, companies like AT&T, who would often save their snowflake login credentials on their own devices too. And honestly, this hack sounds like it was a whole lot easier to pull off than actually finding a shiny Pokémon. People need to remember that storing your data in a locked-down server is fantastic, but it doesn't mean anything if the passwords to access that server are literally sitting on your desktop. Your security is only as good as the weakest link in your chain, and yet these fruitcakes didn't even enable two-factor authentication on their machines. And the impact has been that the hack has got away with 1.3 terabytes of personal info from 560 million Ticket Master accounts. It's including full names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, even payment card data, which they are selling for $500,000 on breach forums, a notorious cybercrime platform that they own. AT&T was hit even harder with info from a quote nearly all of their tens of millions of customers stolen, including which numbers those

customers interacted with counts of the texts and calls and total call durations for specific days or months. The info from which absolutely can and very likely will be used to scam them with tools on the internet, also allowing you to find the names connected to those numbers. And this is the funniest part. AT&T has reportedly paid the group shiny Hunters $370,000 to delete the data, the only proof of which comes from a video of the shiny Hunters clicking the delete button, as if they aren't a criminal organization who hasn't already made a backup. I'm cringing just thinking about it. Seven out of 10 fail, so there's been a bunch of cyber attacks in this series, but when your network is down because of a hacker, you can at least blame it on them, even if it exploited a vulnerability that you should have fixed. However, you know what's a lot more embarrassing? Is when you brick your own Tech, let alone basically everyone else's. Do you remember in July when it felt

like the entire world had a sudden IT crisis. Well, that's because of CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that makes products to protect Windows. And get this: over half of Fortune 500 companies rely on them. This is not a small potatoes company. However, on July 18th, CrowdStrike pushed a minor update for one of their products called Falcon, which is a cloud-based, AI-powered malware protection platform. And it wreaked absolute havoc, sentencing some 8.5 million PCs around the world to the infamous blue screen of death. I'm talking banks, TV stations, airlines were down. Like Delta alone had to cancel around 7,000 flights. Basically, everyone who used Falcon, hospitals were canceling non-urgent surgeries. And even when stuff was running, it was often because people had resorted to doing things by hand, like this handwritten boarding pass for a flight in India. In certain parts of the US, even the emergency 911 number was down. And it's all because of Falcon's little update, which happened all the time to keep up with

new malware threats as the company learns about them. Installed code onto people's Windows computers containing a logic error, which caused the devices to crash since they couldn't compute The Impossible logic. And because the issue is happening on what's called the kernel level, i.e., accessing and editing the entire underlying system, not just the surface-level stuff normal apps have access to. And because it was also a bootstrap driver, meaning it was required for the system to boot up at all, it was like the perfect cocktail to lock those PCs into an endless recovery loop. Fortunately, the fix turned out to be pretty simple: just boot it into safe mode and delete the files associated with the problem. But because of how embedded it had become in a lot of cases, it required an IT professional to have physical access to the machine, meaning that recovery was slow for many organizations, with the disruptions causing a total of not millions, not tens of millions, but 5.4 billion in direct losses for companies. But this one is straight-up bonkers. So Marina one was the US's first

interplanetary space probe. It was designed to journey to Venus, equipped with various scientific instruments to allow it to record data. Spoiler alert: it didn't get there, and you're not going to believe how embarrassing the reason is. The thing was supposed to fly past Venus and use these sensors to collect data about the planet, keeping in contact with mission control for about 15 weeks total. But after all of the work that was put into designing and constructing the craft, which was composed of over 54,000 components, disaster struck. It successfully lifted off on July 22nd, 1962, flying nearly 100 miles upwards for 3 and 1/2 minutes until suddenly, randomly, it veered off course, so much so that they had to issue the self-destruct command to avoid a collision with ships in the North Atlantic. The reason it happened, though, the hardware was absolutely fine. The culprit was an unbelievably easy-to-miss software error. A standard R was used in one equation when it should have been an R with an

over bar and the reason that's so important is that the guidance computer on board that's making sure the thing is on track is constantly checking in with its sensors, and the bar on top of the r is the symbol that makes sure it takes the average of those sensors instead of just taking one reading at face value. So, without the correct R, the probe basically started to overcorrect its course in response to outlining data points that it should have been ignoring. The project cost them around $192 million into today's money, all thrown out the window because of a single typo. I mean, what's the most damage a typo has ever caused? You could actually be pretty bad now, I think about it. 8 out of 10 fail, the only slight Saving Grace being that they'd also already constructed Marina 2, an identical probe, and because the Fatal problem was a completely avoidable human error, they fixed it in about 4 seconds, and Marina 2 was launched successfully just a month later and was the reason that we now know Venus rotates in the

opposite direction to Earth, but nothing beats the Y2K bug. Who, if you were born after 2000, this one's probably going to sound too insane to be true. Do you remember when everyone thought the world was going to end in 2012 because that was the end of a 5,000 years cycle in the ancient Mayan calendar? Well, there was something just like that for the year 2000, only this one was grounded in the much more real fear of a tech apocalypse. Because it turns out that when complex computer systems were originally designed in the '60s, computer scientists figured that they'd save what pitiful storage and screen space that they had by using a two-digit number for the year. We were very much in the 1900s after all. Years beginning with '18' were old news, and '20' felt like too far away. The problem is, as the years ticked up and we got ever closer to the New Millennium, people started to wonder, are computers actually going to understand that '00' means 2,000, not 1900?

and you might think that the only real consequence of that would be waking up on New Year's morning thinking, Hey, that's funny, the clock's just gone back 100 years. There were real reasons to be worried because, as you've seen with the marina, small miscalculations with the input of a computer can have major consequences with the output. In this case, industries that relied on computer track dates could be affected in huge ways, like banks, which track interest daily, could potentially suddenly calculate interest at us 99 years. And places like power plants, which track routine safety checks of things like radiation levels, could pose a threat to human life if these checks were missed. People even started panicking that planes might start falling from the sky and that people's pacemakers would just stop, that old Uncle Joe would just collapse and die the second that you go from one to happy New Year at your party. So, governments raced to avert a potential computer crisis, rushing to update anything and everything to a four-digit date. And I mean everything.

don't think anyone quite expected just how much would be spent on this. You know how some companies in this fails list have lost hundreds of millions here. An estimated 200 to 600 billion was spent to tackle the issue, and that's in the 1990s. And when you think about it, that is a catastrophic amount of money to burn, considering that it could have been avoided by a few computer scientists typing two more characters. N9 out of 10. Thankfully, the steps taken did avert widespread chaos, but the few issues that did still occur proved that the worry was warranted. For example, on January 1st, 2000, many computers did think they woke up in 1900, forcing 15 nuclear reactors across the world to shut down. Some people who did, in fact, incur a 100-year bank loan interests. And hilariously, one customer at a New York video rental store who was handed a bill of $91,200. Yes, for having rented a movie for 100 years. I'll catch you in the next fails.

13 Most EMBARRASSING Tech Fails of all time.

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Embarrassing Tech Fails: From McDonald's to the Optimus Maximus Keyboard

McDonald's partnered with IBM in 2021 for an AI-assisted voice ordering system, resulting in chaotic orders and customers leaving with hundreds of dollars worth of food.

The Optimus Maximus keyboard, with 113 OLED displays, aimed to revolutionize typing but ended up with high resistance keys and a $1,500 price tag, leading to poor sales.

Despite the failures, the company's efforts in mini OLED display technology eventually led to the creation of the Elgato stream deck, a must-have gadget for streamers.

The Journey of Bow and Bell Littles and the $100 Laptop

Paul and Rachel Baron started Bow and Bell Littles after struggling to find a good washable swim nappy for their son, quickly achieving $1 million in sales on Amazon.

A negative review from a used diaper sent by Amazon caused a major setback, leading to $600,000 in debt for the Barons.

Meanwhile, the $100 laptop initiative by Nicholas Negron aimed to transform education in the developing world, offering innovative features but ultimately failing to deliver on all its promises.

The Struggles of Disruptive Tech Products

The $100 laptop project failed to deliver on its promises, with a launch price of $130 and a subsequent increase to $180, leading critics to argue the funds could have been better spent on essential needs in developing nations.

The Rabbit R1, designed to revolutionize personal tech, struggled with a poor battery, security vulnerabilities, and the fact that its functions could already be performed by smartphones, ultimately making it unnecessary.

HP's Touchpad aimed to compete with the iPad using webOS, but it was slow, clunky, and buggy, leading to poor sales and a quick withdrawal from the market after just 48 days.

In 1988, a self-replicating worm from MIT infected 6,000 computers in 24 hours, causing widespread disruption at major institutions, including universities and NASA.

The worm's creator, Robert Tapen Morris, was eventually indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, marking a significant moment in cybersecurity history.

Department of Defense to establish America's first computer Emergency Response Team, leading to increased global cybersecurity measures.

Tesla Cybertruck's Recalls and the Struggles of Concord

The Tesla Cybertruck has been recalled five times in 2023 for various issues, including a warning light, faulty accelerator pedal, windshield wipers, and a software problem, affecting over 27,000 vehicles.

Tesla is also offering free motor replacements, but the Cybertruck's reliability has been questioned.

On the other hand, the video game Concord, developed by ex-Bungie staff and published by PlayStation, struggled to gain interest and had a poor launch, with only 697 concurrent players at its peak on Steam, despite 8 years of development.

Concord's Troubled Launch and Snowflake's Data Breach

Concord, a PlayStation game, struggled with player numbers and had its servers shut down two weeks after launch, despite a rumored $400 million investment.

The game's development timeline missed the hero shooter hype, and it faced competition from more innovative titles.

Meanwhile, Snowflake, a cloud storage provider, suffered a major data breach, with a hacking group stealing 1.

3 terabytes of personal information from 560 million Ticketmaster accounts and AT&T's customer data, leading to a $370,000 payment to the hackers for data deletion.

The Impact of CrowdStrike's Update and Marina One's Failure

CrowdStrike's minor update for their Falcon product caused chaos, affecting 8.

5 million PCs globally and leading to major disruptions for banks, airlines, and hospitals.

The update's logic error on the kernel level locked devices in an endless recovery loop, resulting in $5.

4 billion in direct losses for companies.

Similarly, the US's first interplanetary space probe, Marina One, veered off course due to a software error, leading to its self-destruction.

The Y2K bug stemmed from the use of two-digit years in computer systems, causing fears of a tech apocalypse as the year 2000 approached.

The potential consequences of the bug were significant, affecting industries like banking and power plants, leading to a widespread panic.

Governments and companies spent an estimated $200 to $600 billion to update systems, successfully averting widespread chaos, but some issues still occurred, including nuclear reactor shutdowns and outrageous bank loan interests.