The biggest tech fails of 2021

In 2021, there were times when technology misfired or failed to work entirely — from giant internet outages and crippling ransomware attacks to a series of issues for Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. CNN Business has published its list of some of the most noteworthy tech-tastrophes of 2021.

There were times this year when technology misfired or failed to work entirely — from giant internet outages and crippling ransomware attacks to a series of issues for Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. (So many, in fact, it's the one company we list twice here.)

Here is CNN Business' list of some of the most noteworthy tech-tastrophes of 2021:

In April, cybersecurity experts said the personal information of half a billion Facebook users, including phone numbers, birthdays and email addresses, had been posted to a website used by hackers. Facebook said at the time that the same data had previously been reported as scraped from peoples' profiles by "malicious actors" in 2019 — and the issue that made it possible was fixed the same year. The incident showed yet again how vulnerable companies collecting massive amounts of personal data can be to bad actors.

Also in April, LinkedIn confirmed that publicly-available details scraped from about 500 million of its users' profiles had been offered for sale on a hacker website. Linkedin said at the time that the database for sale was "actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies." The company also said it was "not a LinkedIn data breach."