Big Tech had a tough 2022. This year has seen everything, from multibillion-dollar corporate losses to widespread layoffs.
While there were many things in 2022 that might be labelled as failures, here is a list of the biggest tech fails that kept making news.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter
The Musk-Twitter saga pretty much defined the second half of this year.
Elon Musk began buying Twitter shares in January 2022, eventually becoming the company's largest shareholder by April. On April 14, he made an offer to purchase the company for $44 billion, only to back off from it in July.
After months of legal drama and chaos, Musk finally completed his takeover of Twitter on October 27, and the company was immediately taken private.
Upon acquiring Twitter, Musk promptly fired several top executives and laid off almost half of its global workforce.
Since then, it has been a roller coaster ride for Twitter. There have been several abrupt changes to the core functioning of the platform, the most significant ones being the Blue Checkmark getting paid and the restoration of many previously banned accounts.
The mass reaction to Musk’s handling of Twitter has mostly been negative.
He recently asked on a Twitter poll if he should resign as the platform’s CEO, and over 58 percent of participants said yes. Musk then claimed that he would resign as CEO as soon as he found someone foolish enough to take this role.
Meta bleeds billions
The metaverse may be the future, but not anytime soon.
Mark Zuckerberg went all-in on the metaverse in 2021, however, virtual reality is still far from mainstream.
Worse, Meta's investment in a platform that has not taken off coincided with the company's primary ad revenue falling due to a weak global economy. Consequently, investors began pressuring Zuckerberg to cut metaverse investments by 50 percent.
That’s not all. Facebook, once the default social media platform globally, is rapidly losing users to younger social platforms. For example, there were around 11 million monthly active Facebook users in May 2022, which was a 25.4 percent drop from May 2020.
As a result of this, Meta had to let go of over 11,000 employees worldwide in 2022.
iPhone 14 Pro delays
If you wanted to buy Apple's finest iPhone of 2022 and could afford it, odds are you still don't have one.
Due to problems at Foxconn's plant in China, production of the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max has been severely hampered. Violent protests erupted over salaries at the plant due to an alleged "technical error" in its payment systems.
This plant employs over 200,000 people and serves as the major manufacturing site for the iPhone 14 Pro series. Therefore, the iPhone 14 Pro series has mostly been unavailable around the world during 2022.
Stadia: Game Over
Google Stadia launched nearly 3 years ago to revolutionise gaming. The concept of cloud gaming has also picked up quite well thanks to Xbox Game Pass and Nvidia GeForce Now.
So why was Stadia’s impending demise announced this year? Well, early technical glitches proved to be a disaster for the platform, as early adopters experienced lags and crashes. Stadia was also criticised for its limited collection of games.
These combined factors ultimately led Google to withdraw investments and lose interest in the platform as a whole.
Crypto flop
After peaking in November 2021, crypto assets suffered a $2.2 trillion wipe-out in the following 12 months, with their combined market value tumbling by 73 percent.
Another major setback was the collapse of popular cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November. The platform was found to have misappropriated user funds and assets multiple times. Because of this, its rival Binance backed out of a plan to acquire it.
A criminal investigation was launched on FTX, which served as a massive blow to consumer confidence in crypto in general.
So there you have it, the biggest tech fails of 2022. With 2023 on the horizon, we can only hope that the majority of this year's challenges are partially, if not fully, resolved over the next 12 months.
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