2023: A Year in Review – The Tech Industry’s Biggest Fails
As the clock ticks towards the end of 2023, a retrospective glance at the year paints a vivid tableau of technological blunders. Each month of the year was marked by a significant tech failure, leaving a trail of lessons for the tech industry.
January to April: A Rough Start
The year kicked off with a prolonged outage of the Italian webmail services Libero and Virgilio, leaving hundreds of thousands of users in a communication blackout. February saw a sharp 9% drop in Alphabet’s shares following a glaring error about the James Webb Space Telescope in Google’s promotional video for its chatbot Bard. March bore witness to the premature closure of Disney’s platform, a stark testament to the risks of hefty investments. April’s debacle came in Italy’s promotional campaign for Botticelli’s Venus as an influencer, an effort that turned notorious for its gaffes despite its nine-million-euro price tag.
Summer’s Tech Turmoils
The discontinuation of YouTube stories in June marked Google’s shift towards Shorts, inspired by TikTok. July saw the closure of TikTok’s service ‘TikTok Now’, a seasonal fad that fizzled out quickly. The hipster bicycle company VanMoof declared bankruptcy, leaving customers high and dry despite a successful crowdfunding campaign. A bizarre story of a supposed fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg also took center stage.
Autumn and Winter: The Downfall Continues
September saw the release of the iPhone 15 marred by iOS 17’s overheating issues during charging. As Twitter rebranded to ‘X’, several failures throughout the year highlighted verified users as super spreaders of fake news. Discord’s chatbot ‘Clyde’, based on OpenAI services, was shut down after failing to meet expectations. Finally, as the year wound down, the E3 Show in Los Angeles, the world’s largest video game fair, announced its closure after 28 years, a victim of the rise of streaming services and the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we bid adieu to 2023, the tech industry has a year’s worth of failures to analyze and learn from. The coming year holds the promise of new beginnings and the hope of better strategies to prevent such mishaps. As we usher in 2024, the tech world braces itself to navigate the uncharted territories of the future.
