Embarrassing tech fails, from Mcdonalds, to Tesla, to the global IT crisis...it gets bad. Check out ...
Video Transcript:
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 Tik Tok 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 quiry 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 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 4 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 10 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 fra 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 spillproof keyboard as well as all the ports being covered by the Wi-Fi antenni 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 canot 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 vulner abilities 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 huet 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 Bea at their own game they promised something different because their tablet used the web OS 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 flare that Apple's known for which I think is fair to say was lacking in most Android devices at the time and because web OS 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 was released from a computer 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 us congress's new 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Silver Lining though this was the wakeup call for Global cyber security only a few days after this attack the US 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 Defenders 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 bid Defender now pre-checks every single email and text as they come in for scam and fishing 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 Dodge 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 cyber truck 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 cuz cuz 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 guess that the Cyber tru'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 rear view camera from showing you its feed the result over 27,000 cyber trucks have been recalled that's basically every cyber truck 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 Cyber truck 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 10 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 Gang Busters it was a hero shooter one of the most popular genres in gaming history it was developed by ex bung 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 onetime $40 purchase with no battle pass or microtransactions so what 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 valerant 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 rumored $400 million into developing this thing which would make Concord easily PlayStation's most expensive game ever even the last was part two only cost them 220 m 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 four 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 fruit cakes didn't even enable two-factor authentication on their machines and the impact has been that the hack has got away with 1. 3 terab 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 cyber crime 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 organiz ation 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 crowd strike a cyber security company who 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 crowd strike pushed a minor update for one of their products called Falcon which is a cloud-based AI powerered malware protection platform and it reaped 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 B 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 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.