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Top five worst tech failures in horrible Halloween video

Andy Hoyle is possessed by the Devil himself to tell you about the five most epic tech failures of all time. Hide behind your sofas, kids.

Andrew Lanxon Editor At Large, Lead Photographer, Europe
Andrew is CNET's go-to guy for product coverage and lead photographer for Europe. When not testing the latest phones, he can normally be found with his camera in hand, behind his drums or eating his stash of home-cooked food. Sometimes all at once.
Expertise Smartphones, Photography, iOS, Android, gaming, outdoor pursuits Credentials
  • Shortlisted for British Photography Awards 2022, Commended in Landscape Photographer of the Year 2022
Andrew Lanxon
2 min read

It's Halloween -- the one day of the year you can frighten yourselves silly and get away with wearing zombie make-up to the pub. To celebrate, we take a look at the most horrendous tech failures of all time. Not so much What You're Craving as What You're Cursing.

Satan himself rose up for the occasion, to possess our very own Andrew Hoyle in order to tell you about five of the most epic catastrophes. He's rather pleased with himself, the old devil.

5. HD DVD -- Standard definition video was told quite firmly that it's not welcome anymore and that everyone now wants to see Keanu Reeves explore the whole spectrum of emotion in glorious clarity. HD DVD went head to head against Blu-ray and we were all set for another gory format war. But Blu-ray pretty quickly curb-stomped HD DVD and sent it packing to the bowels of silicon hell.

4. PlayStation Network hack -- You were all perfectly happy using Sony's service for your gaming fun, but things quickly turned sour when the personal details of 70 million customers got swiped. We're happy to see the whole fiasco sent into our hell-storm of fire so none of you have to give it another thought. Unless it gets hacked again. Like it did.

3. Gizmondo games console -- This miserable piece of kit tried to take the gaming world by storm (it even had a flagship store on London's Regent Street) but it was about five years too late and its most popular game was called Sticky Balls. No, really. It didn't help that the company's CEO was paid £1m a year and crashed his Ferrari. Let's all rejoice as it's cast into the pit of darkness where it can think about what it's done.

2. iPhone 4 antennagate -- Everyone was so excited about the iPhone 4, but it didn't take long for the shine to wear off as many of you complained of signal problems when you did something totally wrong held it like a phone. You needn't worry about that old chestnut haunting you in your nightmares any more -- it's been banished to the demon realm, where it will have to answer for itself. And we don't think it can, the signal's pretty poor down there.

1. BlackBerry Messenger service outage -- BlackBerry users all over the world were up in arms when the messaging service decided to pack up and leave for three whole days, due to a simple server overload. Thankfully, BlackBerry fully compensated everyone for it. Oh wait, no, it just offered some free apps. We're sure that totally made up for all the problems you had. Right?

Now you've come face to face with your demons, you can come out from behind the sofa and carry on with your life without living in fear. We've called the exorcist and hopefully Andrew will be back in normal working order later this week to bring you the most popular tech on CNET UK. Happy Halloween everyone!