Hey everyone, it's Jess. We're off for the holiday,
but we wanted to share a story about how one company's disastrous software update led to widespread customer anger,
layoffs, and a complete leadership overhaul, and ended up costing $600 million.
Here it is.
Updating your software.
It's one of our modern, common chores.
Mostly, it's annoying, inconvenient,
But we do it because it's supposed to make sure our stuff works better.
So when a software update somehow makes things worse, people get mad.
Like back in 2014, when an iPhone update caused a bunch of people's phones to crash.
The latest software update called iOS 8.0.1 meant to fix software bugs,
reportedly crashing some user's phones instead.
Or in 2016, when an update to the Nest thermostat left people angry and cold.
Their internet-connected thermostats have been malfunctioning ever
since they got a software upgrade last month.
Or last year, when a CrowdStrike software update caused major travel delays.
It was a faulty software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that caused disruptions across multiple industries.
In the best-case scenarios, companies act fast and fix the problems, and we can all move on.
But our colleague Ben Cohen recently wrote about a software update that has plagued a company for months now.
It was so buggy that it turned into one of the most disastrous software updates in the recent history of consumer technology,