5 biggest tech fails of 2021

2021 began ambitiously to outdo the previous year of the pandemic, and while tech companies strived hard to succeed and bring new unique gadgets to the market, some of them unfortunately failed, affecting the entire tech industry as well. These are some of the worst techs fails of the year. 

Meta

Already rated this year's worst company of the year, Facebook or Meta, faced a tumultuous year especially after whistleblower Frances Haugen outed the company's lax enforcement on misinformation and its obsession with growth. 

Despite attempting to rebrand itself, Facebook has hit an all-time low with users and lost its popularity. Its image of the metaverse that CEO, Mark Zuckerberg tried to sell, failed in the face of Facebook and Instagram's impact on the younger generation. 

The platform has been heavily criticized for prioritizing profits over everything else, while President Joe Biden remarked that the company was "killing people" with the spread of vaccine misinformation on its site.

Internet Outages

2021 saw the most frequent outages, from Fastly to Facebook, users were deprived of the internet for long stretches. 

Fastly, cloud computing service provider that stores copies of key sites, suffered a glitch in June that shut down half of the internet like Amazon. Facebook faced a similar outage in October due to a "faulty configuration" which disconnected the data centers from many social networks. 

The company lost $6 billion amid the outage of Facebook and its other platforms, Instagram and WhatsApp. In December, Amazon's cloud computing service suffered an outage creating issues for Netflix, Slack, Hulu, Disney+, and many others.  

In April of the same year, Google had a two-hour outage, leaving Google Drive, Slides, Docs, and Sheets inaccessible.

Tesla vehicle issues

In April last year, Tesla faced backlash when two people died in a Tesla driverless car that failed to observe a bend at high speed. 

While the company did not comment on the incident, the US auto safety agency said that it had opened an investigation into 27 Tesla crashes, three of which had occurred recently. 

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into 580,000 Tesla vehicles in the last month over safety issues when Tesla allowed gamed to be played in the front center touchscreen.  

As a result, Tesla was compelled to call back 475,000 of its EVs to remove the game feature in line with safety. In July, when Tesla rolled out its FSD Version 9, it was riddled with safety issues like braking events, ill-timed steering maneuvers, and routine computer vision failures. Conclusively there are no self-driving cars for sale today.

Apple

Apple's announced last year that it would check US customer phones and computers for child sex abuse images, a position the company had to later backtrack from.

Apple’s initiative sparked a global backlash from a wide range of rights groups, with employees also criticizing the plan internally.

Critics argued the feature could be exploited by repressive governments looking to find other material for censorship or arrests and would also be impossible for outside researchers to determine whether Apple was only checking a small set of on-device content.

The Global Chip Shortage

The chip shortage began to hit major industries and manufacturers this past year, as the supply of chips directly made technology more expensive. 

The shortage began in 2020 when consumer demand for cars declined, which inevitably forced chip manufacturers to focus on computer equipment and other tech devices. Hence, the shortage compelled companies to increase their prices, or for some big tech companies like Apple, to create their own chips. 

While new chip manufacturing factories have been set up and investment in the industry is growing, Daimler predicted the shortage would continue through 2022.