You know those prescription drug commercials that list so many side effects
that the medicine actually sounds worse than whatever it was supposed to treat?
Well, in the software world, we end up with the same thing more often than you might think
where an update that's supposed to make your gadget work better ends up just breaking it.
Here are four infamous examples of updates that went terribly wrong,
starting with everyone's favorite operating system, good old Windows.
Microsoft is certainly no stranger to royally cheesing off its users
with the botched launches of Windows 98, ME, Vista, heck, even Windows 11,
getting plenty of press coverage. But in 2012, there was a lesser-known glitch
that frustrated lots of people at a very inopportune time.
Microsoft pushed out an update to the .NET framework,
which is basically a programming ecosystem for Windows
to make writing programs easier. .NET was already infamous for botched updates,
but this one was particularly egregious as it screwed up installations of TurboTax,
an extremely popular program for preparing tax returns in the United States.
Specifically, users that installed the bad update found it impossible to print out their tax forms.
The kicker was that this update was pushed out just before April 15th, the US tax filing deadline.
Fortunately, there was a pretty easy workaround, but seeing as this wasn't the first time
a .NET update broke tax software, I can't imagine the however many thousands of accounts
that use Windows were super happy about it. Moving on, we're gonna go to 2013
when the PlayStation 3 ruled the console world. Gamers who owned a PS3 with a larger hard drive
got a very rude surprise when Sony pushed a firmware update
that bricked their systems entirely. Ironically, Sony promised that the update
would improve system stability, but shortly after it was released,
the botched update spawned a nearly 100 page thread
on Sony's forums with people desperate for a fix.
Of course, bad updates do happen and people might have been a bit more understanding
if Sony hadn't made the situation worse by allegedly recommending that a user
send off their crippled PlayStation for service at a cost of $100 out of pocket.
Sony did at least push out a fix a couple of weeks later, but you'd think they would have learned something
from the fact that they were just sued four years earlier
for another update that also bricked a bunch of PlayStation 3s.
Of course, there was one glitch that was a heck of a lot more alarming than a busted PS3 or some late tax forms.
One very uncomfortable glitch occurred on the International Space Station of All Places
also back in 2013. The ISS gets its own software updates on an annual basis,
and during one of those routine updates, a bug took out the entire ground communication system,
meaning that the ISS had no way to talk to mission control back on Earth.
Not only that, one of the crew members reported that they lost access to other crucial data
about how the spacecraft was functioning. Fortunately, they were able to get everything working
later on that same day. Funnily enough, the ISS switched a bunch
of the laptops on board from Windows XP to Debian Linux just a few months later
for stability and reliability. I guess they didn't want to take any more chances.
Finally, let's circle back to Sony for an update that was so bad, most people actually considered it
to be a virus. Back in 2005, Sony's music division
built digital rights management into their audio CDs.
Not super surprising given how popular file sharing was becoming, but Sony went way too far
by including software that actually updated the operating systems code to prevent users
from copying songs. And these modifications were hard to reverse
and created serious security vulnerabilities. Actually, that does kind of sound like a virus.
So Sony had basically put root kits on millions of computers.
But then when people found out about it, Sony's response was to release an uninstall program
that didn't actually uninstall anything and just made the security problems worse.
After multiple lawsuits, including one from the government of Texas,
Sony was forced to relent and give customers up to $150 to fix any computer damage
that their root kits caused. Ironically, Sony used copyrighted software
as part of its root kit without permission, which is shocking, as I know there's never been
any hypocrisy from Big Tech when it comes to protecting their bottom line.
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