WEBVTT

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You know those prescription drug commercials that list so many side effects

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that the medicine actually sounds worse than whatever it was supposed to treat?

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Well, in the software world, we end up with the same thing more often than you might think

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where an update that's supposed to make your gadget work better ends up just breaking it.

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Here are four infamous examples of updates that went terribly wrong,

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starting with everyone's favorite operating system, good old Windows.

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Microsoft is certainly no stranger to royally cheesing off its users

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with the botched launches of Windows 98, ME, Vista, heck, even Windows 11,

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getting plenty of press coverage. But in 2012, there was a lesser-known glitch

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that frustrated lots of people at a very inopportune time.

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Microsoft pushed out an update to the .NET framework,

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which is basically a programming ecosystem for Windows

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to make writing programs easier. .NET was already infamous for botched updates,

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but this one was particularly egregious as it screwed up installations of TurboTax,

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an extremely popular program for preparing tax returns in the United States.

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Specifically, users that installed the bad update found it impossible to print out their tax forms.

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The kicker was that this update was pushed out just before April 15th, the US tax filing deadline.

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Fortunately, there was a pretty easy workaround, but seeing as this wasn't the first time

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a .NET update broke tax software, I can't imagine the however many thousands of accounts

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that use Windows were super happy about it. Moving on, we're gonna go to 2013

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when the PlayStation 3 ruled the console world. Gamers who owned a PS3 with a larger hard drive

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got a very rude surprise when Sony pushed a firmware update

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that bricked their systems entirely. Ironically, Sony promised that the update

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would improve system stability, but shortly after it was released,

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the botched update spawned a nearly 100 page thread

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on Sony's forums with people desperate for a fix.

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Of course, bad updates do happen and people might have been a bit more understanding

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if Sony hadn't made the situation worse by allegedly recommending that a user

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send off their crippled PlayStation for service at a cost of $100 out of pocket.

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Sony did at least push out a fix a couple of weeks later, but you'd think they would have learned something

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from the fact that they were just sued four years earlier

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for another update that also bricked a bunch of PlayStation 3s.

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Of course, there was one glitch that was a heck of a lot more alarming than a busted PS3 or some late tax forms.

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One very uncomfortable glitch occurred on the International Space Station of All Places

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also back in 2013. The ISS gets its own software updates on an annual basis,

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and during one of those routine updates, a bug took out the entire ground communication system,

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meaning that the ISS had no way to talk to mission control back on Earth.

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Not only that, one of the crew members reported that they lost access to other crucial data

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about how the spacecraft was functioning. Fortunately, they were able to get everything working

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later on that same day. Funnily enough, the ISS switched a bunch

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of the laptops on board from Windows XP to Debian Linux just a few months later

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for stability and reliability. I guess they didn't want to take any more chances.

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Finally, let's circle back to Sony for an update that was so bad, most people actually considered it

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to be a virus. Back in 2005, Sony's music division

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built digital rights management into their audio CDs.

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Not super surprising given how popular file sharing was becoming, but Sony went way too far

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by including software that actually updated the operating systems code to prevent users

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from copying songs. And these modifications were hard to reverse

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and created serious security vulnerabilities. Actually, that does kind of sound like a virus.

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So Sony had basically put root kits on millions of computers.

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But then when people found out about it, Sony's response was to release an uninstall program

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that didn't actually uninstall anything and just made the security problems worse.

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After multiple lawsuits, including one from the government of Texas,

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Sony was forced to relent and give customers up to $150 to fix any computer damage

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that their root kits caused. Ironically, Sony used copyrighted software

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as part of its root kit without permission, which is shocking, as I know there's never been

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any hypocrisy from Big Tech when it comes to protecting their bottom line.

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Subscribe! There's no way outro written, so, ha ha!

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That's the outro!