Every year, we celebrate the best achievements and victories, but among these achievements lie some truly embarrassing mistakes. We are all just one step away from tarnishing the company’s reputation and diminishing its market value, appearing on a list like the one below. Here are the highlights of the blunders, public relations nightmares, and foolish decisions from prominent tech figures in the technology world in 2023.
1. Twitter’s Numerous Misadventures
Twitter made many mistakes, depending on your opinion of Company X and its volatile leader (sorry, Linda). But whether you support Elon Musk’s call to make the platform a haven for free speech, or you miss the days of Twitter before X, it was a rough year for the company in 2023. Some of Musk’s questionable decisions include:
- Ending free access to the API: In an attempt to make some money and pay off creditors, Twitter ended free access to its API in February and later banned third-party clients, meaning the end of services like Tweetbot and Twitterrific.
- Disabling multi-factor authentication: It’s no secret that SMS is the least secure method of multi-factor authentication (MFA), but when Twitter eliminated this option in March, it effectively disabled MFA altogether unless people switched to an authentication app or security key, leaving them more vulnerable than ever.
- Auto-replying with a poop emoji: Musk took his disdain for the press to new heights by setting his media inbox to auto-reply to any email with a poop emoji.
- Ending old verification badges: After several failed attempts, Twitter removed old verification badges from those who refused to pay for Twitter Blue (now X Premium). Of course, it turned into chaos, as numerous fraudulent accounts impersonated celebrities, prompting Twitter to allow those with over a million followers to keep their blue verification badges even if they hadn’t paid.
- Transforming Twitter into X: One of the year’s most baffling changes was Musk’s rebranding of Twitter. Who needs brand recognition when you have such an obsession with the letter X?
- Bright X sign on the roof: To ensure you didn’t miss the memo about the name change, Musk installed a massive X sign on the roof of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, angering neighbors and increasing the risk of serious injury due to its unsafe placement.
- Speed limits: Remember when repeated tweeters were limited in speed, essentially to stop spam? Because there’s no better way to increase engagement than by punishing the best users on the platform. (In contrast, Threads did that too.)
- Opening the door to the worst people in the world: The previously mentioned notion of “free speech” meant the return of some very nasty figures this year, including Alex Jones. Bonus: They are getting paid handsomely for their views.
- Elon tells advertisers to go to hell: After numerous major brands, including Apple, IBM, and Disney, pulled advertising from the platform due to Musk’s controversial tweets, he told them to “go to hell.”
2. CEO Changes at OpenAI
With ChatGPT, OpenAI competes with the biggest tech companies, so it was shocking when OpenAI’s board unexpectedly fired CEO Sam Altman in mid-November. There were murky signs about concealing information and reports of the board being unhappy with Altman’s efforts to achieve profitability for the company’s AI technology, but we didn’t really get a clear answer.
May
The council diminished Altman’s popularity within the company and in the artificial intelligence community at large. Reports indicated negotiations for Altman’s return were nearly immediate. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella intervened to calm matters (and protect Redmond’s massive investments in OpenAI). Even Microsoft offered jobs to Altman, co-founder Greg Brockman, and thousands of OpenAI employees who threatened to resign. But all that was to no avail. Just five days after Altman’s dismissal, he returned as CEO of OpenAI with a reshuffled board.
3. Poor Launch of Cruise’s Robotaxi in San Francisco
Self-driving taxis have been transporting passengers across the country for years, mostly with a safety driver behind the wheel. However, this summer, Cruise, a subsidiary of GM (along with Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet), received approval from San Francisco officials to charge for rides in driverless cars in the city.
Things deteriorated quickly for Cruise. As crowds gathered for the Outside Lands music festival, communication signals faltered, causing Cruise’s robotaxi cars to malfunction and resulting in significant traffic jams. Then a Cruise robotaxi was involved in a collision with a fire truck, prompting Cruise to cut its fleet in the city by 50%. But the turning point came when a Cruise robotaxi struck a woman who was thrown into its path after a separate collision. Soon after, Cruise halted all self-driving taxi operations, and the company’s CEO resigned.
4. Cage Match Between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk
It sounds like an episode of South Park, but Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk publicly discussed the idea of a cage match earlier this year. It all started when Musk mocked Threads, and one of his followers said, “Be careful… I heard [Zuckerberg] is learning jiu-jitsu now.” Musk replied, “I’m up for a cage match if he is haha.” On Instagram, Zuckerberg took a screenshot of the conversation and added an ominous caption: “Send me the location.”
The president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Dana White, later said the duo was “very serious” about the match, which would raise money for charity. But as you might expect, things turned sour after Zuckerberg accused Musk of not taking the match seriously, to which Musk responded, “Zuck is a coward.”
5. Reddit vs. Third-Party Clients
Many smart chatbots are trained using data scraped from the internet, including sites like Reddit, which decided this year to charge companies using its extensive discussion forums to provide services like Copilot and Bard. The idea was to get a cut of the AI money from giants like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft, but smaller developers using Reddit for third-party clients found themselves included in the new policy.
The top subreddits responded by going dark on June 12, although some prominent forums remained closed for several days, prompting CEO Steve Huffman to threaten to ban moderators of the forums protesting. Eventually, many Reddit clients such as Apollo were shut down, and users’ main option was to use the revival of r/Place, a digital canvas, to troll Huffman.
6. Overheating iPhone 15 Pro
The iPhone 15 Pro from Apple became the hottest phone of the year. Shortly after its launch, Apple received reports that Pro versions of the iPhone 15 were reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit, making them uncomfortable to hold. Fortunately, this was not like the Galaxy Note 7 issue. Apple blamed a bug in iOS 17, along with app updates that “caused excessive system load.” The issue was resolved with iOS 17.0.3.
7.
Want Blue Chat Bubbles? Get an iPhone
The discussion between green and blue bubbles continued in 2023, with at least two companies attempting to challenge Apple with custom solutions for iMessage on Android. The first was the mobile phone company Nothing, which teamed up with Sunbird to provide an app on the Nothing(2) phone that would give Android users those desirable blue bubbles. But there was one catch: the app wasn’t encrypted as promised. Nothing quickly pulled the app and Sunbird was also halted.
It didn’t take long for Beeper to propose a more secure solution for iMessage on Android with the Beeper Mini app, but Apple quickly suppressed the matter and confirmed that it “will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.” Beeper tried its luck several times but announced on Thursday that it “cannot win the cat-and-mouse game with the world’s largest company.” It implemented one more software update but said, “we currently have no plans to respond if this solution is taken down.”
This struggle led to calls from the Justice Department to investigate Apple for alleged antitrust tactics. For now, Apple indicates that it is only ready to adopt RCS at some point next year, but that won’t bring blue bubbles to Android phones.
8. Hackers Hit the Jackpot at MGM
These days, cyberattacks are commonplace. Most involve hackers leaking terabytes of data on the dark web, forcing victims to subscribe to identity theft protection and hope for the best. But there are other attacks that have a greater impact on the real world, such as the attack on MGM Resorts in September. Vacationers in Las Vegas found themselves locked out of their rooms and unable to access gaming machines or ATMs. MGM confirmed that hackers stole information from customers who dealt with the company before 2019. MGM’s losses are estimated at $100 million.
MGM Resorts declined to provide details about the breach. However, researchers at the VX-Underground malware repository spoke with the hackers behind the breach, who claimed to belong to the notorious ransomware group ALPHV, which was pursued by the FBI this week.
9. 23andMe: Hackers Access 6.9 Million Account Data
DNA testing kits have become popular for verifying your boring ancestry and/or uncovering dark family secrets. What’s not to like about that? The service itself wasn’t breached; hackers used data obtained from previous breaches and tested it on 23andMe to find people reusing their login credentials and passwords across multiple sites. They obtained around 14,000 matches, but the “DNA Relatives” feature in 23andMe allowed hackers to access about 6.9 million accounts.
10. Warning: Don’t Paste Your Private Code into ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a remarkable technology in many ways, but it relies on publicly available data and gets better every day based on the information you provide to it. So it’s clear that you should not input sensitive data into your favorite chatbot. Samsung’s software engineers learned this the hard way when they pasted lines of private code into ChatGPT on two separate occasions. After a third employee asked the smart AI model to summarize meeting lectures, Samsung management intervened and prohibited employees from using ChatGPT. This came after a flaw in OpenAI exposed payment details for about 1.2% of ChatGPT Plus users, including their email addresses, payment addresses, and the last four digits of their credit card numbers.
Applause
The Shame
There are many mistakes, but time is short. Don’t forget these major blunders in tech companies.
- The university’s apology for using artificial intelligence to write a letter to students about the shooting at the University of Michigan.
- The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) after wealthy investors like Peter Thiel withdrew due to concerns about the bank’s health. This left startups and online sellers, including small sellers on Etsy, without a way to access their funds.
- Facebook fixing a glitch that sent friend requests automatically if you looked at a profile. Facebook apologized after seeing the social network sending automatic friend requests to the profiles users viewed. Some people even deactivated their accounts due to embarrassment.
- Pornhub being blocked in the states of Mississippi, Utah, and Virginia. In protest against new age verification laws, Pornhub blocked access in several states, requiring people to use VPNs to engage with adult content.
- Disabling “Browse with Bing” in ChatGPT Plus because it exceeded financial barriers. OpenAI disabled “Browse with Bing” for nearly two months after discovering that people used it to read articles without a subscription.
- Zoom modifying its terms (again) to say it does not use your data to train AI models at all. Previously, the video conferencing company stated it does not use “audio, video, or chat content to train our models without customer consent.” But it later dropped that last part.
- Goodbye to Unity’s CEO after criticism over game installation fees. John Riccitiello resigned after weeks of backlash for the company’s efforts to extract more revenue from game developers.
- After criticism, T-Mobile will not be migrating users to more expensive plans. The hidden price increase came with an option for subscribers who wanted to call and request it. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert later stated that the plan was a small test misinterpreted by the press.
- A test of the national emergency alert system sparks conspiracy theories. The test turned into conspiracy theories as some incorrectly claimed that the test would “activate nanoparticles, including graphene oxide”.
- A visible glitch at SpaceX preventing people from accessing their Starlink accounts. Affected users attempted to create a support ticket but could not access their Starlink accounts. No Starlink customer service could be found anywhere.
- Asus apologizing for the misspelling on the Evangelion motherboard. The Asus motherboard honoring the anime has the misspelling “Evangenlion” next to the screen for the I/O cooler.
- A tech conference listing a non-existent woman in the speaker lineup. The DevTernity event published a name and a fake picture, but the conference founder stated it was a mistake related to automatically generated profiles.
- A Wyze glitch allowing camera owners to get a glimpse into other people’s homes. The glitch gave Wyze camera owners a peek at the feeds of strangers. Wyze blamed a “web storage issue”.
- Twitch quickly backtracks on allowing “artistic nudity”. The live streaming service reversed the policy change after users began posting nude depictions using AI image generators.
Source: https://me.pcmag.com/en/news/21209/oops-the-10-biggest-tech-fails-of-2023
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