In the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a large part of the daily life of the homebound people was covered by various technological products and services. The same technological services which have been the lifeblood of technology-intensive professionals turned into a source of recreation and communication of homebound people in lockdown.
This does not mean that the technology industry has seen success in 2021 from all sides. In some cases, netizens and various top technology companies have suffered from complete failure, such as data leaks, Internet outages and ransomware attacks.
In April of 2021, cyber security experts said that the phone numbers, birth dates and e-mail addresses of at least 500 million Facebook users had been leaked to a website. Only one hacker had done the job. In the same month, the same number of user information was leaked from LinkedIn. Its 500 million user accounts are being sold by hackers through websites that collect information that is open to the public.
The following month, in May, a wrong person was identified as a suspected arsonist by the real-time crime alert app – Citizen.
The last year has passed a golden time of ransomware attacks. Various business organizations were targeted in the name of password reset. The Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest energy pipeline companies in the United States, was also affected by this. Later, they re-activated the organization’s network with a ransom of 4.4 million dollars.
Twice in less than two weeks, the global Internet connection was disrupted. As a result, a large part of the Internet became inactive. No one has ever heard of such a big internet outage in a tech company. On June 8, Reddit, Amazon, and several other companies closed their operations due to the outage. On June 17, Akamai Technologies was hit by the same disaster. There were three outages on Amazon in December. Which affected Disney Plus, Slack, Netflix, Hulu and many more.
October 4th was probably the worst day of the year for Facebook. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook worker, exposed the role of social media as a ‘facilitator’ behind real-life violence, inspired by the spread of fake information and hate speech in the media that day. After that there was a big outage on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram which lasted for about an hour. Members of Congress are still investigating Haugen’s case.
Earlier this year, Tesla chief Elon Musk confronted CNN over his company’s ‘full self-driving (FSD)’ software. Testing Tesla Model 3 on the streets of New York showed that the software was not completely self-contained. Rather, it only had some features that were useful for assisting the driver.
However, in the years of chip crisis, Facebook files and ransomware attacks, TikTok, the most talked about and critically acclaimed service has kept going up unabetted. According to the global list of Apptopia, the TikTok app has been downloaded 656 million times in 2021 surpassing Facebook.
