It's Halloween -- the one day of the year you can frighten yourselves silly and get away with wearing zombie make-up to the pub. To celebrate, we take a look at the most horrendous tech failures of all time. Not so much What You're Craving as What You're Cursing.
Satan himself rose up for the occasion, to possess our very own Andrew Hoyle in order to tell you about five of the most epic catastrophes. He's rather pleased with himself, the old devil.
5. HD DVD -- Standard definition video was told quite firmly that it's not welcome anymore and that everyone now wants to see Keanu Reeves explore the whole spectrum of emotion in glorious clarity. HD DVD went head to head against Blu-ray and we were all set for another gory format war. But Blu-ray pretty quickly curb-stomped HD DVD and sent it packing to the bowels of silicon hell.
4. PlayStation Network hack -- You were all perfectly happy using Sony's service for your gaming fun, but things quickly turned sour when the personal details of 70 million customers got swiped. We're happy to see the whole fiasco sent into our hell-storm of fire so none of you have to give it another thought. Unless it gets hacked again. Like it did.
3. Gizmondo games console -- This miserable piece of kit tried to take the gaming world by storm (it even had a flagship store on London's Regent Street) but it was about five years too late and its most popular game was called Sticky Balls. No, really. It didn't help that the company's CEO was paid £1m a year and crashed his Ferrari. Let's all rejoice as it's cast into the pit of darkness where it can think about what it's done.
2. iPhone 4 antennagate -- Everyone was so excited about the iPhone 4, but it didn't take long for the shine to wear off as many of you complained of signal problems when you did something totally wrong held it like a phone. You needn't worry about that old chestnut haunting you in your nightmares any more -- it's been banished to the demon realm, where it will have to answer for itself. And we don't think it can, the signal's pretty poor down there.
1. BlackBerry Messenger service outage -- BlackBerry users all over the world were up in arms when the messaging service decided to pack up and leave for three whole days, due to a simple server overload. Thankfully, BlackBerry fully compensated everyone for it. Oh wait, no, it just offered some free apps. We're sure that totally made up for all the problems you had. Right?
Now you've come face to face with your demons, you can come out from behind the sofa and carry on with your life without living in fear. We've called the exorcist and hopefully Andrew will be back in normal working order later this week to bring you the most popular tech on CNET UK. Happy Halloween everyone!
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Comments 6
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anonymous 31 October, 2011 18:20
How can you put the Blackberrry problem as the worst one when the iPhone fault was a fault with the hardware itself and never was resolved. It wasn't just something that lasted a few days. I had both phones and although the Blackberry problem was a serious pain at least it was resolved after a few annoying days. I think the iPhone problem should be in the top spot as it was a serious design flaw that Apple refused to acknowledge and at least Blackberry did eventually own up and sort it.
anonymous 31 October, 2011 22:16
Tech failures of all time and there all in the last 6 years one in the last month, bit of a lazy list really!
Andrew Hoyle 1 November, 2011 00:49
By all means make your own list too.
anonymous 1 November, 2011 11:54
Point is, YOU'RE being paid to do it, and do a crap job of it.
Rich Trenholm 1 November, 2011 15:15
A problem that affected some people somewhere for a long time, or a problem that affected everyone everywhere for a short time. Which is worse?
Any suggestions of other disasters? There's the Xbox red ring of death of course
Bltch Bearne 1 November, 2011 22:02
Because the iPhone could still be used But a blackberry is useless when it goes down.