Congressman Anthony Weiner

CNN’s Top 10 Tech Fails Of 2011

With 2011 came many technological advances, but also great failures and missteps. CNN took the liberty of compiling a highly accurate and entertaining list of some of the biggest tech failures in the past year. From former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter Scandal, to Netflix’s disaster of a concept, Quikster, 2011 seemed to be filled with enough failures to balance out the successes. Luckily for us, those failures were extremely entertaining. Here are CNN’s picks for the biggest tech failures of the past year.

-Anthony Weiner’s Twitter scandal

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner saw his name in headlines everywhere this year, but I’m willing to bet it was not at all in the way he would have wanted.

The former Congressman found himself at the forefront of a scandal when his Twitter account was allegedly hacked and used to send explicit photos to some of his female followers.

Well, as it turns out, the photos were of him, so naturally, that situation didn’t work out so well. After vehemently denying his involvement in the scandal, Weiner ended up confessing to the allegations and resigned.

-Go Daddy’s misguided decision to support SOPA

One of the more recent tech fails of 2011 occurred earlier this month when internet domain registrar Go Daddy found itself under fire after supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). In case you missed BANGSTYLE’s coverage of this misstep, after learning that Go Daddy had been included on a list of SOPA supporters, many websites threatened to move their domains off Go Daddy if they continued to support the act. Eventually, an entire website was created to boycott Go Daddy. Go Daddy quickly took the hint and removed their support of SOPA, but this was still easily one of the biggest tech fails of 2011.

-’Duke Nukem Forever’

“Duke Nukem Forever” is being dubbed as the biggest video game fail of the year. In the words of CNN’s Ravi Hiranand, ”At best, it can look a few years out of date; at worst, it is a blurry, stuttering mess. Playing the game feels like being thrown back into the mid-’90s, and not in a happy, nostalgic sense.”

CNN notes that this was one of the kinder reviews of the game .

-’The other’ tablets

Apple’s iPad was a raging success in 2011. However, many rival brands were not. The Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry’s PlayBook, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, and the HP TouchPad all flopped tremendously this year. With many of them coming in at about $500, roughly the same price as the the iPad 2, many people chose to stick with the industry leader. At just $199, the Kindle Fire, which is a smaller and simpler tablet, is the only one that appears to being doing well.

-Playstation network fail

With roughly 70 million users, a company like Playstation cannot afford for its network to go offline, and in late April of this year, that’s exactly what happened.

After a hacker was able to access Playstation user account information, the entire system ultimately got knocked offline, and wasn’t fully restored until early June.

But what was arguably even worse was Sony’s failure to communicate to users what had happened until a week after the attack. Failure all around.

-iPhones + Bars

In 2011, the tech world was buzzing when two different Apple employees left iPhone prototypes in bars on two separate occasions. In one case, this resulted in tech website Gizmodo’s showcasing of the device, launching a firestorm.

-Netflix’s Quikster

When talking about the failure that is Netflix’s “Quikster,” CNN summarizes it best.

“Netflix, the Web’s most popular movie-rental service, first rattled some customers by raising prices in July.

Then, in September, the company announced it was, basically, splitting itself in half. Web-streaming video would still come from Netflix. DVD-by-mail rentals would come from a separate company.

Called … “Qwikster.”

Where to start here? Customers who wanted both services complained about having to set up and maintain two different accounts on two different websites. Then there was the new name, which felt dated (Napster and Friendster, anyone?) and like it was spat out by some zany-misspelled-startup name generator.

Oh yeah … and there was the fact that the “Qwikster” Twitter handle was already owned by a guy whose avatar was a weed-smoking Elmo muppet.”

Naturally this disaster of a Netflix spinoff was shut down after just three weeks.

-PayPal shuts down fund for needy children at Christmas

PayPal, playing the role of a modern-day Scrooge, shut down blog Regretsy’s wildly successful fundraiser drive for needy children at Christmas. PayPal, which was processing the donations, stepped in and froze the fund because Regretsy was using a “Donate” button that’s supposed to be for nonprofits only. Bah Humbug. A day later, PayPal admitted to recognizing its error, but it definitely was not a good look.

-iPhone 4S battery problems

Shortly after the iPhone 4S flew off of shelves this October, customers came back to complain about the short battery life. Initially, Apple ignored the problem, but after two weeks, announced that there would be an update to the phone’s operating system released shortly. All in all, a small hiccup in the otherwise wildly successful iPhone 4S.

-BlackBerry’s failure of a year

The BlackBerry had been slowly getting pushed out of the limelight by iPhones and Androids, but technical issues in 2011 seemed to be the nail on the coffin for many BlackBerry users. A data center outage in October caused users to lose messaging ability in parts of Europe, the Middle East, India, Africa, Latin America and North America.While RIM did credit the affected users with a package of free apps, many users said their final farewells to their BlackBerry’s after the incident.

Source: CNN