In the fast-paced world of innovation, every breakthrough carries the risk of missteps, miscalculations, or under-delivering promises.
The biggest tech story of 2024 — the CrowdStrike outage that affected businesses and consumers nationwide — was also one of the year’s most notable failures. But the CrowdStrike story is more than just a tale of failure — it’s also a testament to resilience and recovery.
TechRepublic has compiled the most significant tech flops of the year, exploring how they were addressed — or left unresolved.
SEE: These are the hottest cybersecurity news stories of 2024.
CrowdStrike bug strands travelers amid mass blue screens of death
On the morning of Friday, July 19, the CrowdStrike cloud security platform released a content configuration update for Windows. A bug in the Content Validator used in the update caused a cascade of errors that spread across CrowdStrike’s customers. That customer group included about 8.5 million Windows devices in businesses, airports, and emergency services departments.
CrowdStrike fixed the problem on their end 78 minutes after the update. However, affected machines needed to be rebooted manually, which created ample work for their team over the weekend.
Major data breaches hit communications networks and personal data
Two major data breaches reminded cybersecurity professionals to stay on their toes. In August, the U.K.’s National Public Data — a consumer background check service — suffered a breach that exposed Social Security numbers among 2.7 billion data records. The exploitation sparked conversations about legal protections for personal data.
In September, the Wall Street Journal reported a group of threat actors associated with China had gained access to U.S. broadband networks, specifically through Cisco routers. Both American and international cybersecurity agencies have issued warnings about the threat group known as Salt Typhoon.
Google AI Overviews faced a ‘rocky’ launch
Google introduced its AI-powered answers in search this year, with mixed success. In May, the AI’s responses went viral as Google seemingly recommended “eating at least one small rock per day” and confidently repeated a political conspiracy theory. The comment about rocks was taken from a satirical site, and the conspiracy theory came from Reddit. In response, Google restricted user-generated content in AI Overviews and worked on detecting “nonsensical queries.”
The situation highlighted the limits of how generative AI pulls information from the internet.
Privacy concerns cloud Microsoft’s Recall
2024 was the year of the AI PC, with many different tech companies racing to identify which AI features would gain the most traction.
Microsoft bet on the appeal of using AI to control PCs or search files using natural language. Its Recall feature promised to intuitively answer questions like “Where’d I put the confirmation email for the restaurant for Saturday?” However, this convenience came at a cost: Recall captured screenshots of active windows every few seconds, saving them as a timeline, raising concerns about privacy and data usage.
Microsoft delayed Recall’s public appearance. As of Dec. 6, Recall is available in preview to Windows Insiders.
Wearable AI rises — and falls
Two novel AI products experimented with form factor this year.
The Humane pin was designed as an AI assistant clipped to clothing, while the makers of the Rabbit R1 pitched it as a replacement for a smartphone. The pin received generally negative reviews and a fraction of the expected sales. Rabbit R1 followed a similar path. These devices are clever because generative AI could open new possibilities for form factors.
Both Humane and Rabbit devices are still on sale. But the wide adoption of those form factors — including smart glasses — has been an uphill road even for the tech giants. Ultimately, wearable, AI-first devices were a dead end in 2024.
Intel has had a difficult year
Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors saw widespread instability and crashes for years. Intel discovered a faulty microcode algorithm that caused problems this summer. They eventually delivered a patch. Intel stock and market share have fallen as rivals NVIDIA and AMD take advantage of the generative AI boom. Intel may recover if CPU sales improve next year, but for now, they missed the boat on the AI hardware boom despite a portfolio of reliable products.
Tesla autonomous products are on shaky ground
Tesla’s ambitious self-driving mode has faced several setbacks since mass recalls last year, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigating the automaker about four specific accidents. Another investigation linked the self-driving mode to dozens of deaths. Tesla’s Q4 vehicle safety report claimed Autopilot had fewer accidents per million miles than the average U.S. vehicle.
Meanwhile, further reports revealed that many humanoid Tesla robots were operated by humans. Tesla doubled down, releasing a video of an Optimus robot operating “by myself” in a factory.
Sales of the electric cars fell in 2024 as other automakers matured in the “green” market, although Tesla remains a strong contender.