Failure

Diary From a Lifetime of Tech Failure

On my 32nd birthday, my 22-year-old sister mailed me a first-generation Tamagotchi. Too young to have suffered the Tamagotchi herself, she may have sweetly assumed that I was once the kind of focused, enraptured child from the throwback commercial—one with an innate or even competent grasp of faddish handheld electronics. She would be wrong. The…

Why These Social Networks Failed So Badly

Sixteen years ago, the sun set on Web 1.0, and we embarked by the light of our smartphones to 24/7 connectivity, down a road paved with corporate blunders, littered with yesterday’s top 8 friends, scrubbed n00ds, trashed chiptune tracks, bomb threats, and downy unicorn costumes. Comedic treasures were born and abandoned by parent companies; screaming…

Marissa Mayer Set to Receive $186 Million for Failing Because This Is How Corporate America Works

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer continues to stack up piles of cash, despite her veritable failure to rescue the company from a pile of its own rot. After numerous setbacks, including two massive security breaches and dwindling ad revenue, Mayer is set to make about $186 million as a result of the company’s sale to Verizon,…

‘Supercard’ Startup Plastc Goes Belly Up, Screwing Thousands of Backers

There are dozens of ways to pay for things, but apparently, the world was not ready for one more. Plastc, the company that promised to put all of your credit cards on one chunk of plastic, is officially dead. Early backers of the startup found out the news after the company sent an email to…

National Weather Service Data System Went Down During a Blizzard This Week

The National Weather Service warns us about potentially dangerous weather, so it would be pretty scary if their highly reliable data analysis and warning system, the one they use to disseminate all their predictions, went down. It went down. Both the primary and backup routers at the National Weather Service’s Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System…

The 9 Most Disgraceful Crowdfunding Failures of 2015 

Donating to a crowdfunding campaign is risky. You hand money to internet strangers who give you nothing but a promise in return. Sometimes it pays off and you get an Oculus Rift. Other times, you get a colossal dud, or worse, a complete scam. Kickstarter created an “Integrity Specialist” this year to crack down on…

Damn, This Fake Orca Sucks At Being a Fake Orca 

The small fishing village of Astoria, Oregon, tried to scare off a pesky sea lion colony with a large fake mechanical orca. It was a cunning scheme, one that pitted the sly artifice of man against whatever it is sea lions have. But alas—nature won. The plan to unleash the fiberglass orca—which is actually a…

15 Actors Who Tried To Become Action Stars And Failed Miserably

For every Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Daniel Craig, there are a dozen would-be action stars who tried to get their movie careers off the ground, but couldn’t quite manage it. Here are 15 actors who thought they could punch, shoot and leap into stardom, but reality had other plans. 1) Shaquile O’Neal, Steel Shaquille…

The restored HD video of the Atlas missile explosion is amazing to watch

The guys at AtomCentral uploaded this video depicting the failed test of the Atlas missile back in 1961. The footage—scanned to HD from the original film—shows the rocket exploding in an epic and mesmerizing slow motion that would make Michael Bay drool. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

No, a Cryptocurrency Can’t Fix a Broken Economy

Auroracoin, the digital currency given as a free hand-out to every resident of Iceland, was supposed to be a a salvo for a country rankled by a broken financial system. It was heralded as the beginning of hyper-localized cryptocurrencies; it became the second-largest cryptocurrency before it even launched, valued at half a billion dollars at…

Fireworks launch malfunction causes massive explosion

The explosions caused by this malfunctioning fireworks launching mechanism were so big and the noise so deafening that they could make Michael Bay proud. Beware of your volume level. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

The Wallops Island launch facility, viewed from the air the day after the Orbital Science Antares rocket exploded right after liftoff. The photo was taken by the Wallops Incident Response Team on Wednesday October 29th. [NASA/Terry Zaperach]

Politician Proposes Hoverboard Lanes For DC By 2015

If the recent White House Correspondents Dinner has shown us anything, it’s that politicians are the true masters of comedy in American society. Case in point: a recent joke proposal by a D.C. politician to install “hoverboard lanes” in the nation’s capital. You know… like bike lanes. Only they’re for hoverboards. Because hoverboards are going…

Video of Zenit-3SL Rocket Failure Over the Pacific: “Houston, We Got a Limp Dick!”

If you must fail while launching a rocket, you hope it gets destroyed in a fiery ball of fire. At least that makes for a good show worth a few million dollars. Sadly, the people from Sea Launch didn’t even get that from their Zenit-3SL rocket, which failed miserably today at 6:56am GMT, after lifting…

Twitter Was Taken Down Yesterday By a “Cascading Bug”

Following yesterday’s failure, Twitter has gotten to the bottom of what went wrong: it was a software issue known as a “cascading bug”. https://gizmodo.com/essential-bookmarks-for-surviving-the-next-apocalyptic-5920348/ If that doesn’t mean an awful lot to you, you’re not alone, so Twitter has tried its best to explain the issue on its blog: A “cascading bug” is a bug…

How Kickstarter Hides Its Failures from the Internet

We have our opinions on Kickstarter. But central to whatever Kickstarter claims to be is its ability to teach business neophytes the ropes. As Dan Misener shows, though, that’s undermined by suppressing the visibility of failed projects. Kickstarter does not want you to see failed projects. Failed Kickstarter campaign pages include robot meta tags to…

How It All Went Wrong For Sony

Over the past decade Sony has fallen from tech giant to struggling underdog, with a series of mistakes and mismanagement causing the firm to miss out on just about every big advance in consumer electronics. But where did it all go wrong? The New York Times ran a wonderful feature over the weekend about the…

McDonald’s Twitter Marketing Turns into Disgusting Customer Revolt

Somewhere in corporate Hamburgerland, an ad executive with a penchant for “social media” and “the Twitter” thought a McDonalds-themed hashtag would sell more food. Oh boy was he wrong. Mickey D’s Twitter push is backfiring harder than E. coli vomit. The facile burger peddlers hoped to create a “viral,” “organic” marketing campaign, presumably comprised of…

This Is Lockheed Martin’s New Amazing Fighter

Last December, Lockheed Martin assembled the last F-22 Raptor ever. It’s the USAF’s one and only fifth generation fighter*. It has never seen combat. It spent part of its life grounded. Now they want to sell you a new one. The only problem is that, as amazing as it looks and as amazing its technologies…

Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates

The Navy’s newest warship is slowly disappearing, one molecule at a time. This isn’t a sequel to the 1984 sci-fi flick The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a Navy destroyer-escort vanishes through a time portal in Pennsylvania only to reappear in Nevada, 40 years later. No, this time the disintegration is real. And so is the…