Yikes: The 12 Biggest Tech Fails of 2015

This year, like every year, the tech world faced fails big and small. 

If you go on Instagram or Pinterest a lot, you may have seen this one particular quote about failure: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Who is it that gifted us with this inspiration? Only one of the most successful basketball players of all time: Michael Jordan.

And what does this have to do with technology? Whether you're into basketball or brogramming, nobody is immune to failure. What really counts is what we do after we fail. Would Apple be the richest tech company in the world today if it threw in the towel after the Newton MessagePad? Would Microsoft be where it is if it gave up after the Zune?

Of course not, but that doesn't mean it didn't sting when it happened. This year, like every year, the tech world faced fails big and small. Let's take a trip down memory lane (and be thankful it didn't happen to us).

Google

Mountain View had a few blunders this year – from the homophobic slurs its translation tool was spitting out to the racist results on its Maps service. Google was also forced to apologize after its Photos app automatically tagged two black people as gorillas. And who can forget the image of an adorable little Android...peeing on Apple in Google Maps, which forced Google to shut down and totally overhaul its Map Maker feature. 

 

Facebook

The world's biggest social network faced backlash this year for including "fat" in the list of feelings one could select to describe their mood on the social network, complete with chubby-faced emoticon. Yeah, the Internet didn't like that very much.

The company faced another embarrassment this year when a Harvard student was able to pull location data from Messenger and create a creepy Chrome extension that could track the location of Facebook friends on a map. The project got the student some headlines, but it resulted in Facebook rescinding an internship offer. 

 

Lenovo Superfish Debacle

A major PC manufacturer shipping machines with adware pre-installed? Yeah, we'd call that a fail. Lenovo apologized for adding the Superfish software to PCs and released a tool to get rid of it, but still faced a lawsuit over the move.

More recently, Dell apologized for a tech support feature on its PCs that accidentally left those machines open to hackers. Dell PCs shipped since August 2015 are equipped with a root certificate known as eDellRoot. According to Dell, it's "part of a support tool and intended to make it faster and easier for our customers to service their system." 

 

Long Live Porn

Turns out, not even Google can erase porn from the Internet. Just three days after banning explicit sexual content on its Blogger platform this February, Google gave in to pressure from porn fans who were less than thrilled about the new policy, and said it would not crack down on adult content.

 

Tinder Plus Pricing

Singles over the age of 30 had good reason to be pissed off at Tinder this March. The hookup dating app officially launched a premium tier with a few perks you won't find in the free version but charged the over-30 sect $10 more a month to subscribe. Tinder never did apologize for its ageist pricing, but said it was strictly a business decision. 

 

Merger Fail

Comcast on Feb. 12 confirmed rumors that it would acquire Time Warner Cable in a $45.2 billion deal. Consumer groups, rivals, and members of Congress were not impressed, though, and by April, pressure from regulators turned the deal to dust. Better luck next time.

 

Reddit Rebellion

July 3 wasn't a great day for Reddit. The site's director of talent, Victoria Taylor, who managed the popular AMA interviews, was unexpectedly given the axe and users were not thrilled. In protest and solidarity, they joined forces and were able to shut down more than 263 subreddits, seriously limiting the site for about a day. Amidst of wave of backlash over crackdowns on offensive content, meanwhile, CEO Ellen Pao was ousted.

 

Amazon Prime Day

How do you celebrate 20 years of Amazon? How about discounts on Tupperware, because that's about the only thing shoppers were able to snag during the company's big Prime Day sales extravaganza in July. People quickly took to Twitter to vent about the lackluster options and crack jokes about the event like "So far, I've bought an oil drum of mayonnaise from today's #PrimeDay sale!" and "#PrimeDay is like when grandma says 'help yourself to the candy jar!' but it has nothing but raisins and sugar-free salt water taffy." Nonetheless, it seems like someone was buying those drums of mayo, as Amazon proclaimed it a huge success.

 

Ashley Madison

You didn't forget about this one yet, did you? The hack of online cheating site Ashley Madison in July is probably THE worst fail of the year, in so many ways. Just in case you missed it: Online vigilantes broke into the site, stole its user database, posted it online, and made it easily searchable. The fallout included an ousted CEO, tons of lawsuits, broken marriages, and a major PR crisis for the Duggar family. 

 

Galaxy Note 5 Stylus

Perhaps Samsung rushed the testing phase for its Galaxy Note 5, because a number of users have learned the hard way that their smartphone's stylus is way too delicate. According to Android Central forum posters, sticking the stylus in backwards will not only make it difficult to extract, but could destroy some of the phablet's key features. "Mere hours after getting my Note 5, I put the pen back in the hole without really looking at what I was doing, and stuck it in backwards," user "FrogVomit" wrote on the forum. "To my utter horror, I was unable to extract it!" Many other users have complained of the same issue, with one even dubbing the problem "the backwards pen of death." Samsung responded with a warning on the package. 

 

Oops: Now You Have Windows 10

Not everyone wanted Windows 10 at first, but some people didn't really have a choice. See, Microsoft in September downloaded the Windows 10 installer to PCs just in case people wanted to upgrade. Then, the following month, the company bundled the new OS with a Windows update, and here's the kicker – selected 'upgrade to Windows 10' by default. If someone didn't want to get Windows 10, they had to manually uncheck a box before proceeding. As you can imagine, some weren't really paying attention and ended up getting the new OS before they were ready. Microsoft quickly said having the upgrade on by default was a mistake and removed the check.

 

'Steve Jobs' Flop

Released in October, the highly anticipated Aaron Sorkin film Steve Jobs wasn't exactly a hit at the box office. The movie generated $7.2 million in its opening weekend, on a budget of $30 million. That barely topped the earlier Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher, jOBS, which made $6.7 million on its opening weekend but had half the budget.