The technology. Every step of the way, we are surrounded by them, and they make our lives easier. Our technological future has already been defined by some gadgets and solutions. Companies invest billions of dollars in IT, hoping to be at the forefront of digital disruption and drive fundamental change. The consumer side, on the other hand, is driven by a desire to have the newest and greatest products, which speeds up technology evolution.
So yes, there is an alignment between the customers’ needs and expectations & the tech businesses. We also contribute to the digital revolution, where technologies will lead us to a more sustainable and bright future.
But… Not everything goes as planned. In honour of Halloween, we have gathered some horror stories from the tech world to spook you – boo! Read if you dare!
01 TESTS OR TRICKS?
Banks experienced months of disruption due to a planned system update on the only weekend of the year. Several clients had trouble logging in, while others saw details from other clients' accounts or inaccurate data of their own. As a result of insufficient rigorous testing, a bank had a problem when it switched to a new platform for banking.
02 LOST IN THE MAZE OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN
A Japanese car manufacturer recalls over 1 million airbags. It was caused by a software glitch in the airbag sensors that prevented the affected cars from detecting whether an adult was in the passenger seat, and, therefore, the airbags were not able to deploy.
03 MYSTERIOUS SHOPPING
During the biggest shopping day of the year, one of the largest US marketplaces suffered glitches. The website was unavailable to some users; others were unable to make payments. In a 36-hour window, analysts estimated the company could raise at least $3.4 billion by this event alone. It was impossible to shop due to system glitches.
04 LOST IN THE BLACK HOLE
Among the most recognizable outages in the IT world was a massive data loss that affected a well-known code collaboration platform. Data would be copied from the production environment to the test environment by the tech team. A dangerous account was automatically removed from the database during the operation by the automated system. Due to discrepancies in data, the coping process was slowed down at first by an accident traffic spike. Information from the prod environment was removed, and one of the employees accidentally deleted the production database. The company lost 300 GB of customer data.
05 MAGIC POTION WORTH $3 MILLION
In 2015, a famous chain of coffee houses experienced an internal failure due to which 60% of stores across the US and Canada were forced to close. The stores couldn’t process payments, and they were giving the coffee away for free. The outage occurred during the daily system refresh and lasted about 3 hours. According to rough estimates, the company lost around $3 million during the outage.