Bad software experiences make users and businesses both suffer. For customers, the frustration of it all leads to negative sentiment, poor adoption, and ultimately increased churn as they look for a better solution elsewhere. For employees, it means diminished productivity, hindered collaboration, and more compliance risks for IT.
These outcomes are bad enough, but every so often a bad software experience reaches the tipping point from a merely negative into an outright disastrous outcome. Here are five times a bad software experience was so bad, it made headlines:
1. That $87 trillion rounding error
At Citibank, it was supposed to be a day like any other. An employee was tasked with transferring $280 to an escrow account and set about doing it. The only problem? A confusing software experience meant they didn’t realize the field they were filling out automatically added a bunch of zeros.
This meant that instead of transferring a couple hundred dollars, the payment transfer instead was for $81 trillion. Naturally, transferring the equivalent of 75% of the global economy would have presented big logistical problems for all parties, and the payment was detected and reversed about 90 minutes after processing. Still, if ever there was an illustration of why a clear UX with contextual support matters, this is it.
2. That app rollout that angered customers worldwide to the tune of tens of millions of dollars
Software companies are constantly making updates to their products and redesigning experiences to be better. The trick is making sure that what they consider “better” aligns with what their users consider “better.”
Sonos made the mistake of not validating some major changes to their platform and UI with customers. The result was widespread customer outrage over the disappearance of popular functionality such as editing a playlist and using a sleep timer. The botched rollout and user frustration that followed led to a spike in support tickets and a pledge from the CEO to fix the app in biweekly updates.
When all was said and done, remedying the updated software issues cost the company an estimated $30 million, in addition to delaying the release of new hardware products. The story was a great reminder to businesses to put the user at the center of your software strategy above all else.
3. That buggy software that led to “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in U.K. history”
When users report serious flaws in software, businesses need to take those claims seriously. Unfortunately, that was not the case with leadership at the U.K. Post Office, whose rollout of a computing software program called Horizon led to early complaints of bugs in its accounting systems. In short, the software mistakenly reported money shortages where there were none.
Rather than investigate the software, the Post Office took the faulty data at face value, launching more than 700 prosecutions against employees for stealing funds which had not in fact been stolen. The resulting chaos has been described as “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in U.K. history” and led to countless lost jobs, destroyed reputations, and financial ruin for the victims. Hundreds of former sub-postmasters have since taken action against both the Post Office and the company that produced the faulty software. Employee feedback is a gift—and not taking action on it can be a curse.
4. That time bad weather and legacy software created a perfect storm of flight disruptions
In December 2022, Southwest Airlines became mired in operational chaos during the peak of the holiday season. The cascade of flight disruptions and cancellations ended up costing the third-largest U.S. carrier $800 million in revenue and made it the subject of a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation.
What caused all the problems? The short answer was lack of preparedness to deal with bad weather—itself a problem stemming from a bad software strategy. As it turned out, while Southwest was pouring money into improving its customer-facing apps and features, it was neglecting updating critical IT and operations systems necessary for tasks like reassigning crews and rebooking flights. By neglecting its back office, the airline caused disaster for its front-end customers.
5. That time a false missile alert was triggered by a very real user error
One morning in January 2018, residents of Hawaii woke up to a frightening text alert notifying them that a ballistic missile attack was imminent and to seek immediate shelter. A full 38 minutes passed before a correction was sent out.
What caused the botched communication about a non-existent attack? In a word: a clunky UI. While the Hawaiian governor initially explained that “an employee pushed the wrong button,” investigators digging deeper discovered the software UX in question played a major role. The options for sending a test alert vs. a real one looked confusingly similar, making it all too easy to mistake one for the other, as apparently happened. In this case, the fault lay not with the person but with the software process (and bad UX that went with it) as designed.
Chaotic software experiences are a fact of life for many businesses—but they don’t have to be. With the power of the Pendo platform, teams can design software that’s smarter, smoother, and easier to use. Get a custom demo and see how.
