We rely on computers for an ever-increasing proportion of our day-to-day lives. As such, it can sometimes be hard to imagine how something so common and well-understood could ever lead to errors costing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Nevertheless, severe security flaws affect almost every single device on the planet (yes, likely including the one you’re reading this on right now), and rushed designs can claim hundreds of lives. Let’s take a look at ten times computers failed—or were made to fail—in expensive, sometimes even deadly, ways.

10 Mars Climate Orbiter

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a small space probe launched on December 11, 1998, by NASA to enter Martian orbit and both study the atmosphere of the Red Planet and provide valuable insight into its climate and any surface changes that might occur. The launch went as planned, and the probe traveled toward Mars with seemingly no issues, but unknown to the mission control team on Earth, the spacecraft was being put on a trajectory that would lead to the failure of the mission.

The orbiter was being navigated by various teams of people—some who used metric units, and others who used imperial units. Due to this simple conversion error—and the misconfiguration of the computer systems on the part of Lockheed—a course correction sent the Mars Climate Orbiter far too close to the planet, and it was likely violently burned up and destroyed in the atmosphere.^[1]

9 Ariane 5

Ariane 5 is a class of heavy-lift space rocket utilized in Europe. Jointly created by 20 European nations—including Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—it has been continuously refined and altered to be more efficient, reliable, and powerful and is still in use today.

Following its initial development, the first fully completed Ariane 5 rocket lined up on the launchpad and prepared for its maiden flight on June 4, 1996.^[2] The rocket fired up the engines on both its core stage and its gigantic boosters and took to the skies, accelerating upward and beginning to turn at a much greater rate than its predecessor, the Ariane 4, as expected. Unfortunately, this was exactly why the rocket failed.

The internal computers and software responsible for monitoring speed and orientation aboard the Ariane 5 were reused from the Ariane 4, but the greater speed of the new rocket caused the computers to experience a “hardware exception” while converting a 64-bit floating point number to a 16-bit integer. Essentially, the more powerful rocket exceeded the limits of the older systems in just 37 seconds, causing the stored numbers to flip from 32,768 to – 32,768, confusing the rocket and initiating a sudden turn downward that resulted in a catastrophic breakup and aerial explosion, destroying both the rocket and its payload.

8 Knight Capital Group

Knight Capital was a American-based financial services firm buying and sharing stocks of huge value in large quantities on the global stock market. It was the dominant trader in the United States, with a share of approximately 17 percent on NASDAQ.

This all came crashing down at practically a moment’s notice on August 1, 2012.^[3] That morning, when the stock market opened, the automated computer systems based at Knight Capital began rapidly buying and selling millions and millions of shares distributed among hundreds of stocks for a total of 45 minutes, before the systems were isolated and stopped. Knight Capital was forced to sell these shares back at low prices, which resulted in a total net loss of over $440 million—or roughly $10 million per minute.

New trading software had been installed improperly on one of the computers by a technician, which caused the fault and destabilized the entire stock market for a short period. Following this debacle, Knight Capital had to be acquired by another financial firm, Getco, as the company simply lacked the money to continue and had to be “rescued” by other firms.

7 Stuxnet

Stuxnet is the name given to a piece of malware discovered in 2010 and thought to have been in joint development by the Americans and the Israelis as a cyberweapon since 2005. Targeting real-world mechanical systems, Stuxnet is generally regarded as the first known piece of malware intended to cause real-world, tangible damage.

Stuxnet appears to have mostly been employed against Iran’s nuclear program—infiltrating the nuclear facility at Natanz and infecting its computer systems, manipulating machinery in a destructive manner. It appears to have been snuck in via a simple, easily detectable USB drive, of all things. Between November 2009 and late January 2010, it is estimated that this malware caused 1,000 nuclear centrifuges—ten percent of the facility’s total number—to violently tear themselves apart by forcing changes in rotor speed.^[4] Stuxnet forced the centrifuges to first increase in rotation speed and then decrease in a highly effective attempt to cause instability. It is estimated that this destruction resulted in a 30-percent decrease in nuclear enrichment efficiency for Iran—a huge impact that undoubtedly hindered Iranian nuclear efforts.

6 WannaCry

In May 2017, a worldwide cyberattack was launched that infected Windows-based computers with ransomware. Ransomware is a form of malicious software that encrypts user data, making it unusable, and demands a payment to decrypt it and give it back to the user.^[5] WannaCry most significantly affected older Windows systems like Windows XP and spread to over 200,000 computers in 150 countries.

The ransom demanded between $300 and $600 per computer. Data was returned safely to those who paid the ransom. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service was especially badly affected, and tens of thousands of computers controlling MRI scanners, theater equipment, and more were attacked, causing some nonemergency cases to be turned away while the attack was contained. Worldwide, the cost is estimated at up to an enormous $4 billion, and the West has placed the blame squarely on North Korea’s shoulders.

5 Dhahran Patriot Missile Interception

The Patriot missile system is a United States-developed surface-to-air missile system capable of shooting down both aircraft and ballistic missiles, should they be detected and confirmed as enemy targets. It is widely employed today by both the United States and several of its allies, including Germany. It was also widely used in the Gulf War of 1991 to protect American soldiers and aircraft, which is where it failed due to a known software error.^[6]

A Patriot missile system installed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, had been operational for 100 hours, causing its internal clock to drift by 0.34 seconds. The Israelis had detected this issue two weeks earlier and advised the US to periodically reboot the system’s computers. This was not conducted. On February 25, 1991, a “Scud” ballistic missile launched by Iraq hit the US Army barracks in Dhahran, killing 28 American soldiers. The Patriot missile system had activated and detected the missile, predicting where to look for it next—due to the drifting internal clock, the system looked in the wrong place and found no missile, so it shut down and did not attempt an intercept, which could have saved many lives.

4 Meltdown

Meltdown is a vulnerability present in all Intel CPUs released between 1995 and October 2018, as well as some ARM processors. Given that the vast majority of all computers run Intel CPUs, security analysts describe the vulnerability as “catastrophic” and initially didn’t believe the reports of the vulnerability to be true, due to how severe they were.

Meltdown exploits the way modern CPUs function and allows processes running on a computer to see all information currently being used by the CPU by avoiding security measures designed to stop this. The implications of this are terrible—someone using Meltdown to attack a computer could see passwords, sensitive financial information, images, and practically anything they wanted without users’ knowledge, all while avoiding antivirus software.^[7] Intel has released emergency security patches to fix this exploit, as has Microsoft, but this has reportedly come at a cost of performance—from five percent to a whopping 30 percent. Given how widespread this exploit is, it is most definitely destructive.

3 Spectre

Spectre is similar in nature to Meltdown. It was also uncovered in 2018, but it’s even more widespread. While Meltdown is only effective against Intel CPUs for the most part, Spectre affects practically every single computer system as of 2019. It has been reported that some variants of Spectre cannot be mitigated to any reasonable degree by software changes at all and will require hardware changes which are currently being implemented.

Spectre works by tricking a program into accessing innocent-seeming memory but actually allowing an attacker to read this data and potentially retrieve sensitive information without user approval.^[8] As of this writing, only a very small amount of CPUs are immune to this exploit—most notably the recently released AMD Zen 2 processors and Intel Ice Lake processors. Software patches, like with Meltdown, are applicable but again introduce performance drops comparable to Meltdown, in addition to causing sudden, unexpected reboots as patches are applied. It is unlikely that Spectre will disappear completely for a very long time, until hardware mitigations are employed within every single computer system—and it is likely it is affecting you right now.

2 ILOVEYOU

Starting on May, 5, 2000, tens of millions of people around the world received an e-mail with the subject “ILOVEYOU.” The e-mail generally contained a small sentence like “Please read the attached LOVELETTER from me” and would have a file attached. The file was called “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs,” and millions of people opened it out of curiosity—perhaps searching for love—causing the script contained within it to activate.^[9]

The hidden script would destructively overwrite random files on the computer and automatically send a copy of itself to every single address in Microsoft Outlook, causing it to spread extremely quickly. ILOVEYOU began in the Philippines and spread to Hong Kong, Europe, and finally the US. It is estimated that the malware caused approximately $8 billion in damages worldwide and cost around $15 billion to remove from computer systems. Ten percent of all Internet-connected computers in the world were affected, and 50 million infections were reported in just a span of ten days.

1 Boeing 737 MAX

The Boeing 737 MAX is a variant of the aging Boeing 737 line of narrow-body, twin-engine passenger airliners originally developed in the late 1960s. Since then, the 737 has been routinely updated and upgraded to fit in the modern world of aviation. However, it could be argued that the 737-MAX took this a step too far.

Rushed into development and production, the 737-MAX needed greater efficiency to keep its fuel costs as low as possible. To do this, it needed larger engines that could not be traditionally mounted on its wings. As a workaround, the larger engines were mounted further forward than normal, introducing a number of differences in the way it flies. To avoid the increased cost of pilot retraining for these new characteristics, Boeing instead implemented a system known as MCAS to mitigate these differences by automatically pushing the nose of the aircraft down when excessive angle of attack is detected. It was this software acting erroneously that led to the crash of two 737 MAX flights months apart: Lion Air flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 March 2019, claiming a combined total of 346 lives as the aircraft were forced into the ground by the MCAS system. Since these two crashes, the 737-MAX has been grounded worldwide and is not allowed to fly passengers due to safety concerns.^[10]

A guy from London, writing lists on anything he finds interesting—generally something scientific or technology-based.

Most bank failures don’t make prime time news, though when they do, it’s usually bad news for everyone else. Some of the largest financial crashes in history were triggered by the collapse of major banks and other financial institutions, caused by factors like risky lending practices, bad assets, and lack of government regulation. 

10. Bank Of Credit And Commerce International

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International – or BCCI – was a Luxembourg-based institution, founded in 1972 by a Pakistani financier called Agha Hasan Abedi. BCCI gained a reputation for its innovative and flexible financial solutions – especially in the developing world – as it quickly grew to be the seventh largest private bank in the world. By the 1980s, BCCI operated in 78 countries, with assets totaling over $20 billion.

By the late 1980s, however, reports of financial irregularities at the bank started to make global headlines, as investigations by regulators in several countries uncovered evidence of money laundering, bribery, and fraud. In 1991, BCCI was shut down by regulators in the UK and the US, with all of its assets frozen. During the proceedings, it was revealed that the bank was directly or indirectly involved in a range of criminal activities, including support for terrorist organizations, dictators, and drug traffickers. The collapse of BCCI resulted in billions of dollars in losses for investors and creditors around the world, along with a general loss in confidence in the global banking system. 

9. Bank Of New England

The Bank of New England was a large regional bank based in Boston, as well as one of the oldest financial institutions in the United States. Prior to its collapse in 1991, the bank had been profitable and successful in the region, with assets totaling over $22 billion at the time of its failure. As it was later found out, the bank’s success was largely built on a foundation of risky loans and questionable lending practices, eventually leading to its downfall.

In the late 1980s, the real estate market in New England had already begun to decline, as many of the bank’s loans to local developers and real estate investors went into default. As losses mounted, the bank and its subsidiaries were unable to raise sufficient capital to cover the liabilities, and were ultimately forced to declare bankruptcy in 1991.

The collapse of the Bank of New England was one of the largest bank failures in U.S. history, as it affected small businesses and job opportunities across northeast USA.

8. Colonial Bank

Colonial Bank was a regional bank headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, with branches throughout the southeastern United States. It was founded in 1981 and grew rapidly after a series of acquisitions and mergers. By 2009, the bank had more than 340 branches and $25 billion in assets.

Like many other financial institutions at the time, Colonial Bank had significant exposure to the stressed subprime mortgage market, with a number of loans to borrowers with poor credit histories on its sheets. Many of these loans were bundled together into complex securities that were sold to investors around the world, ultimately causing the financial crash of 2008. As the housing market began to collapse, most of these loans defaulted and left Colonial Bank with major losses.

In August 2009, Colonial Bank was seized by regulators, and all of its assets – totaling about $22 billion – were sold to BB&T Corp. 

7. MCorp

MCorp was a bank holding company based in Texas. Intended to be a strong regional bank competing with larger national institutions, it quickly grew to become one of the largest banks in Texas, with over $18 billion in assets at the time of its failure. 

The primary cause of MCorp’s collapse was its over-reliance on the oil and gas industry, as the company had invested heavily in the energy sector during the 1980s. When the oil market crashed in the mid-1980s, MCorp was left with high losses on its balance sheet, combined with excessive debt to finance its earlier expansion. The bank increasingly found itself unable to service its debt obligations, and was eventually shut down in March, 1989. The collapse of MCorp had many repercussions for the Texan economy, along with a heavy bill for the FDIC to repay their insurers and depositors.

6. Herstatt Bank

Herstatt Bank was established in 1956 as a small, privately-owned bank in Cologne, Germany. It was initially focused on foreign exchange trading and quickly became known around the world for its expertise in the field. In the 1970s, though, the bank started to diversify its activities, including lending to other banks and trading in speculative investments.

The collapse of Herstatt Bank happened in June 1974, when it was unable to meet its liabilities due to being exposed to significant foreign exchange risk. It was eventually declared insolvent, and the German banking authorities stepped in to liquidate all of the institution’s assets.

The collapse of Herstatt Bank led to a few repercussions for the financial world, as many of its counterparties were left with substantial losses. There was also a widespread loss of confidence in the stability of the system, directly leading to the formation of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

5. Hokkaido Takushoku

Hokkaido Takushoku Bank was a Japanese bank founded in 1900 for the development of the  Hokkaido region. It would play a major role in the economic development of the island, funding many of its earliest infrastructure and agriculture projects. 

In the late 1980s, though, HTB began to expand aggressively, as it heavily invested in Japan’s real estate and speculative finance sector. At the time, the country was going through an economic bubble and most banks were eager to finance large-scale construction projects. The bubble burst by the early 1990s, though, plunging Japan’s markets into a financial crisis. The value of HTB’s assets plummeted overnight, combined with allegations of fraud, mismanagement, and embezzlement by top officials at the bank. 

The Japanese government intervened in November, 1997, when it placed HTB directly under state control and bailed out its depositors. The bank’s total assets were valued at around $80 billion at the time of its collapse, along with about $7.5 billion in bad loans. 

4. Continental Illinois

Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was founded in 1910 in Chicago, Illinois as a small bank serving the local community. By the 1980s, it grew through mergers and acquisitions to become the seventh-largest commercial bank in the United States, right before its collapse in 1984. 

The bank’s troubles began in the late 1970s, when it started to focus on commercial real estate lending to boost the overall profitability of its portfolio. The bank’s management excessively invested in risky real estate projects, resulting in huge losses during the 1980s real estate crash and global oil crisis. 

The collapse of Continental Illinois was one of the largest bank failures in US history, as it had assets worth $40 billion at the time of its fall. It was also a significant blow to the US banking system, as the crash threatened to destabilize the entire financial sector. The government had to eventually step in to prevent a wider crisis, bailing out the bank with a $4.5 billion loan and taking over its ownership.

3. IndyMac

IndyMac Bank was founded in 1985 by Angelo Mozilo and David Loeb, who also founded one of America’s largest mortgage lenders, Countrywide Financial Corp. The bank became known for its aggressive lending practices, like offering low-cost mortgages to borrowers with poor credit histories. These high-risk loans, combined with the larger financial crisis of 2008, led to its closure by the Office of Thrift Supervision on July 11, 2008.

IndyMac was easily the largest mortgage lender to collapse during the housing crisis, triggering the failure of multiple other institutions in the wider savings and loans market. After the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, took control of it in July 2008, all of its assets – valued at about $32 billion at the time of the collapse – were subsequently sold to OneWest Bank.

2. Credit-Anstalt

Credit-Anstalt was an Austrian bank founded by the Rothschild family in 1855, though it was nationalized after the Second World War. It played a major role in the development of Austria’s industrial and financial sectors, and by the early 21th century, it had become one of the largest banks in Europe. 

That would last until about the late 1920s, thanks to a combination of factors like the global economic downturn, the Austrian government’s economic policies, and the bank’s own risky lending practices. Credit-Anstalt had heavily invested in Austrian infrastructure during the early-1920s boom, though it had been unable to pay back its debts during the Great Depression. 

The bank collapsed in May 1931, triggering a bank run by its depositors across Austria. Many historians consider it to be the beginning of the Great Depression, as the failure had a domino effect on the European banking system and led to a wave of bank failures and financial crises in Austria and other European countries. 

1. Washington Mutual

By the end of 2007, Washington Mutual was easily one of the largest financial institutions in the United States, with over 2,200 branches across the country and about $183 billion in customer deposits. Throughout the early and mid-2000s, Washington Mutual aggressively issued high-risk mortgage loans to borrowers with poor credit history, which was essentially the underlying cause of the entire 2008 crisis. By the end of 2008, Washington Mutual had gone bankrupt after closing down in what we now know as the largest bank closure in history.

The federal government seized control of the bank in September, 2008, selling its assets to JP Morgan Chase for $1.9 billion. The collapse would have a huge impact on investor confidence in the larger market at that time, as the bank held assets worth $307 billion at the time of its collapse. The failure of Washington Mutual and other major institutions during the 2008 crisis led to the passing of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010.

About a hundred years ago, the technology of the world was decidedly different than it is today. Automobiles for the average citizen were just becoming commonplace, TV had yet to be invented, and the idea of the internet would have sounded like madcap witchcraft to even the most astute scientist. But for all the advances we’ve enjoyed with technology and all the ways it’s made our lives better, it’s far from infallible. Tech is failing all the time and there have been some stunning fails in recent memory.

10. Juicero

What do trendy, hip, proactive go-getters love more than anything? If you guessed juice and/or pointless gadgets, you have your finger on the pulse. The global juice market is bearing down on $200 billion a year. So yes, we love juice. Kitchen gadgets rake in around $17.6 billion per year. It’s a match made in heaven to put them together! Or it should have been.

In 2017, Juicero seemed like it was brilliant. A fancy kitchen gadget to make tasty juice. Individual packets of fruit were pressed in an internet connected machine that was backed by some big name investors who put $120 million into the idea.

The machine itself was like a vise that squeezed pre-made veggie and fruit packets with four tons of force to make delicious, fresh juice. And then one day, someone realized you could just squeeze the packets by hand and didn’t need the $699 juice press. When reporters put it to the test, they discovered that they could get just as much juice, and faster, doing it bare handed. 

Even after dropping the price to $400, the Juicero had already fumbled its launch too badly. They went bankrupt after being in business only a few months.

9. Zillow’s A.I.

Zillow is a real estate company that gained a lot of press in recent years for its marketplace dominance. They spent much of 2021 snatching up so many houses that they had to put the kibosh on it for several months. They had suffered a serious technological failure born from a bit of overconfidence and possibly ignorance as well.

Most people never realized Zillow actually bought and sold houses, thinking it was just a forum for real estate agents to list property. The truth was the company was in the business of flipping properties, and they had developed some AI technology to assist them in this task. Their confidence was so high that they were letting the AI make cash offers for properties. That turned out to be a bad idea. 

By November, the company had a backlog of 7,000 houses they needed to get rid of, worth around $2.8 billion. They were forced to shut down their AI algorithm and suspend home buying as a result of its slapdash spending, proving definitively that you can’t let a website invest in real estate across an entire country. 

8. Tesla Bot

Few companies are as well known these days as Tesla. With Elon Musk constantly in the news, the company can’t help but pop up frequently as well, and not always just in relation to the antics of its CEO. Don’t forget, Tesla is still leading the way in the electric car game and they frequently come out with something new and exciting to keep them on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

In August 2021, Tesla held a press event to let the world know that they were working on a humanoid robot. The goal, according to Musk, was to create a machine that can do boring, dangerous or repetitive tasks for humans. So far so good. The problem was the rollout.

For whatever reason, Musk chose to show off the idea of the robot before anyone had made a real robot. So, instead, they rolled out a man in a spandex jumpsuit pretending to be a robot. And then he danced, and it wasn’t good.

Whether or not it was meant as a joke didn’t matter. The company was raked over the coals in the media the next day. Many people chalked it up as a stunt to distract from bad press, but whatever the true motivation, it made one of the biggest companies and one the richest men in the world look foolish.

7. The Freedom Phone

There is a certain subsection of America that will look at anything they find disagreeable or threatening as a direct attack on their freedom. And their response to this attack is to randomly and nonsensically start assigning the label “freedom” to anything they feel supports their POV. Remember when France opposed the Iraq War and someone tried to rename French fries “freedom fries?” It happened. 

In more recent history, the Freedom Phone was designed for supporters of Donald Trump, who wanted to get out from under “Big Tech’s” thumb and enjoy a smartphone that wasn’t going to censor them or push a liberal agenda. It would have an app store with no censorship and even an anti-surveillance operating system. And hey, if those are your politics, that’s great. There’s money to be made appealing to people based on their political beliefs. The problem was that the phone itself didn’t really align with its own politics.

To start with, the Freedom Phone was just a rebranded, cheap Chinese phone. The $499 Freedom Phone was actually a $119 Umidigi A9 phone. Never heard of Umidigi? Neither had anyone else, really. So it wasn’t made in America and the idea that it was surveillance free and censorship free, coming from China, where neither of those attributes is highly valued, turned out to be a bit of a joke. No specs were available on the website for buyers, the OS was replaced with one made by those Big Tech companies, there are huge privacy concerns with their unregulated app store, and nearly every tech website has advised buyers to avoid this thing like the plague. 

6. Quibi

What can you say about Quibi? This is arguably the biggest bomb of 2021, a fact only tempered by the knowledge literally everyone but those involved seemed to see it coming from a mile away. 

The idea behind Quibi seemed to be the merging of traditional TV and film with something more fast-paced and consumable like YouTube and TikTok. Shows were all going to be short, as in five minutes or so so you could watch them during a morning commute, and they featured some of the biggest names in Hollywood like Kevin Hart, Anna Kendrick, Sam Raimi, Idris Elba, and so many more. How were there so many big names? Could have had something to do with the nearly $2 billion in investment money. 

Quibi lasted for about seven months. No one was on board. You couldn’t watch Quibi on a TV, only a cell phone. You couldn’t screencap Quibi shows. It was far too expensive for what it was and, most importantly, nearly everything they made kind of sucked. Critics and viewers alike universally panned almost every show on the platform. 

5. Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 was released at the end of 2020 and was one of the most hyped games in recent years. It even starred Keanu Reeves, for goodness sake. It was also one of the fastest selling games ever, with nearly five million pre-orders before its launch and about 13.7 million sold in total. Sounds like a huge win, right? Well, not exactly.

Around 30,000 buyers ended up getting refunds from the developer because the game was so buggy as to be nearly unplayable. The PlayStation Store also issued refunds and ended up removing the game entirely. 

The game was extremely glitchy on both PS4 and Xbox One. Lawsuits were filed for making the games work so poorly on older generation systems and then hackers stole information from the developer. 

At the end of the day, even when people were able to enjoy the game and had it run perfectly, the game turned out to be okay. Just okay. It never lived up to the hype and a lot of people have mostly forgotten about it since its release.

4. Coolest Cooler

Making a cooler into a tech fail is no small feat. A cooler can literally be a styrofoam box, so a company needs to go above and beyond to make it a failure, let alone one that drags technology down with it. But that’s just what the Coolest Cooler did when it fumbled its way into existence a few years back.

In 2014, the Coolest Cooler was one of the biggest campaigns ever on Kickstarter, which raised a stunning $13 million, a fact no one could have seen coming. Who knew coolers were so popular?

The Coolest Cooler was supposed to be able to charge devices like your phone and feature its own blender and Bluetooth speaker, as well as some other knickknacks. Fast forward to 2019 and the company filed for bankruptcy as the cooler finally went down in flames. 

The CEO blamed Chinese tariffs for ending the product line, but product reviews from 2016 had already pointed out that the cooler was mostly garbage. With a $399 price tag, you’d expect a high tech cooler to at least work right, and this one didn’t. The blender was mediocre at best and the battery life was about four whole minutes of blending.

The cooler never got released during its Kickstarter because the company ran out of money, so backs had to pony up an additional $96 to get one if they still wanted it. Plus, people who didn’t back the Kickstarter and just bought one on Amazon got theirs faster. 

3. Galaxy Fold

Science fiction has enticed us for a few years with the idea of foldable tech. Things like phones or tablets that you can roll up and bend seem convenient because enough of us have dropped or crushed phones and broken the screens to make it a desirable feature. So, based on that, Samsung went ahead and made a screen that you couldn’t roll but you could at least fold. Or that was the idea.

The Galaxy Fold was unleashed in 2019 and it looked kind of like a wallet. You could fold it clean in half and then unfold it and your screen was right there, arguably giving you twice the screen capacity of the size of it in your pocket. The price tag for this remarkable tech was nearly $2,000. Things didn’t go well.

Once Samsung actually let reviewers try out the phones, they failed immediately. It took only a day or two for most reviewers to point out that their folding screens just didn’t work. Some developed bulges, some only worked on one side of the fold. Other reviews removed a protective film because they didn’t know not to remove it and basically destroyed the phone.

After the phone’s release, Samsung claimed to have sold one million units in about 4 months, then quickly walked that back saying the 1 million was what they hoped to sell. Samsung’s CEO later admitted they pushed the Fold out too soon and it was embarrassing. 

2. Hacked Sex Toys

By now, everyone knows that they need to protect everything that connects to the internet from hackers because they’re looming around every corner. We all have dozens of passwords to protect everything we own and with good reasons – hackers really will hack into anything. That includes sex toys.

There’s a strong and growing market for adult toys that are connected to the internet to allow remote control by other users for reasons you can imagine all on your own. But the problem is that few of these devices have any security built into them. 

The most obvious security risk is any personal data that can be gleaned by hackers from a connected device. This may not seem like much at first, and may only be embarrassing information related to your use of sex toys. But that’s not all. 

One user on Twitter recently pointed out how their computer had been hacked and someone gained access to their Metamask, a browser extension that lets you access Ethereum and other crypto business. The user lost some NFTs and funds and the only unusual thing they could think of on their network was a sex toy they’d plugged in to charge. 

1. WeWork

WeWork was a tech startup company that helped provide shared office space for new companies and startups. So basically just real estate for businesses, though they also dabbled in virtual spaces alongside real ones and tried very hard to dupe people into thinking they did things when they really did very little. The company would rent large office spaces long term, and then divide up smaller spaces within that property for more short-term renters to use it as their day-to-day office space. Somehow, this idea managed an initial valuation of $47 billion.  

The company got an $8 billion investment from SoftBank and they set about buying office spaces in major cities across the country. They projected the market for their business to be upwards of $3 trillion and no one thought that sounded insane. They got this number by deciding that literally anyone who worked at a desk in a city where they had an office qualified as a potential member. 

The CEO and his wife were notoriously bad at business and almost cartoonishly inept. He worked barefoot and did tequila shots in the office while she once fired someone because their “energy” was off. 

The company’s only real strength seemed to be mismanaging money. In 2018, they lost $1.9 billion off of $1.8 billion in revenue and continued to tank. The CEO had to resign just to instill some faith in the business, not that it worked at all. In 2019, their IPO failed and had to be pulled. In 2021 they reported over $2 billion in losses in the first quarter alone.