Top 10 Software Failures 2012

It is time to bid farewell to 2012 and give a warm welcome to 2013. Lots of things happened in 2012, some were good and some were awful in software industry. In this blog post, I would like to mention few Top 10 software failures 2012 that make a remarkable print in software industry.

Following are the software failures which are not ranked nor arranged in any order.

1.     US Department Of Justice site hacked

On January 2012, US federal agent arrested leaders of popular illegal media sharing upload site megaupload.com which caused $500 million to entertainment industry. After few days of arrest, group of activists called Hactivists attacks Department of Justice website using Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack.

2.     Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) software glitch

Customers of RBS and Natwest faced issues in their bank account. Glitch cause was due to unusual software upgrades which happened during business hours. Customers were not able to access their bank accounts and online tools.  This issue lasts for five days which created havoc.

3.     Twitter Crashes

On June 21, 2012 famous micro blogging site Twitter crashed and it displayed “Fail Whale” image. Twitter PR tweeted that the issue caused by a cascaded bug in one of the infrastructure. But later UGNazi claimed that they attacked Twitter via DDoS. It is Twitter’s worst crash in 2012 in 8 months.

4.     LinkedIn passwords leaked

On June 2012, more than 6.4 million passwords have been leaked online. Hackers posted hashed passwords on Russian forum. A Russian forum leaked LinkedIn password. LinkedIn asked their users to change their passwords immediately.

5.     GoDaddy down

On Sep, GoDaddy, popular web hosting company faced in problems in DNS. Thousands of websites went down. Anonymous named @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the attack. He said that he like to test how the cyber security is safe and didn’t reveal more reasons.

6.     Over 10,000 email IDs has been hacked

On Jul 2012, over 10,000 government official’s email IDs has been hacked which came into limelight only on Dec 2012. Attach was done on official government network, to steal email ids of PMO, external affairs, defense, finance ministries and Intelligence agencies. This is the biggest and worst cyber-attack in India.

7.     Knight Capital software glitch

Knight Capital, American Global services firm which trades 3.3 billion shares every day reported a huge loss in its third quarter due to software glitch. Knight Capital loses $440 million and 68% due to ERP error which generated erroneous orders to buy stocks major companies which is listed in NYSE.

8.     Apple Maps errors

Apple released its own map application for iOS users. But this is one of the worst post release disasters. There was lot of bugs like no labels, wrong directions, no public transit directions etc. were identified by the end-users. Apple’s CEO published a public apology for the erroneous software. He advised to use other alternatives till the complete product is done.

9.     Click Frenzy fails

Click Frenzy is Australian online sales event which is similar to US Cyber Monday. But this year, Click Frenzy site was crashed and displayed 404 error. Click Frenzy infrastructure was not able to accommodate huge number of concurrent users and it went down for 12+ hours which led to huge loss.

10.  Chicago Election website crashes and US election glitch

On Jun 2012, Chicago city election website crashed and went down due to heavy traffic. Voters were redirected to Illinois State Board Of Elections website or Google polling places. Also, there were many glitches in the voting machines, such as touch screen errors, automatic change in the vote etc.

Above are the dark sides of software world, there are quite good things happened. YouTube exceeded more than 8 million simultaneous viewers watching Felix Baumgartner highest free fall, Microsoft Windows 8 release, Apple iPhone 5 and iPad mini, Facebook IPO, Google’s New Privacy Policy, 15,358 Tweets per Second (TPS) has been sent on July 1, 2012 during EURO 2012 and many more.

Happy Holidays!

May developers give bug-free software in 2013! J

If I had missed anything BIG, please let me know in the comments section.

Sources:

  • http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/19/technology/megaupload_shutdown/index.htm
  • http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240158575/RBS-still-feeling-knock-on-effects-of-software-issues
  • http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/technology/twitter-down/index.htm
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18338956
  • http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/10/tech/web/go-daddy-outage/index.html
  • http://www.indianexpress.com/news/over-10000-email-ids-hit-in-worst-cyber-attack/1046874/
  • http://www.zdnet.com/knight-capital-future-in-jeopardy-over-botched-software-upgrade-7000002116/
  • http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/sep/24/apple-maps-problems-list
  • http://www.news.com.au/technology/biztech/how-to-get-the-best-deals-in-click-frenzy/story-fn5lic6c-1226520380827#ixzz2CoVknexr
  • http://www.channelbiz.co.uk/2012/12/14/sqs-top-ten-software-blunders-2012/
  • http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/chicago-election-website-_n_2083803.html

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