In a nutshell: A button that doesn’t work, a shopping cart that empties during checkout, or being unable to log in to an account—it doesn’t take much to annoy a user and make them want to switch to a competitor. This guide covers: TikTok, Call of Duty, Tesla, and the NHS.
Does testing mean doubting? Perhaps, but it can prevent bugs with disastrous consequences—like the ones we saw in 2021, which the affected companies would have gladly done without.
A button that doesn’t work, a shopping cart that empties during checkout, or an inability to log in to an account: it doesn’t take much to annoy a user and make them want to go to a competitor. Not only is this bad for the company’s image—as it causes it to lose credibility and the trust of its customers—but it also has a direct impact on revenue. And sometimes, certain bugs can even escalate far beyond expectations and spark a major public backlash, even making headlines in the media. Here’s a look back at the biggest bugs that marked 2021.
TikToK
Imagine this: you have a TikTok account with thousands of followers, and one morning you log in to find that all your followers have disappeared. That’s panic-inducing, isn’t it? And that’s exactly what happened on May 3, 2021. TikTok encountered a glitch that displayed the wrong number of followers. Some users even found their accounts blocked for no reason, while others simply had trouble accessing the app.
Of course, users didn't wait to express their frustration on social media. That day, the hashtag #TikTokDown quickly became a trending topic. Fortunately, TikTok responded fairly quickly and the bug was fixed promptly, but users’ frustration was palpable, and the social media platform’s brand image suffered significantly as a result. With automated testing, this situation could surely have been prevented—or at least detected—before it got out of hand.
Call of Duty
In July 2021, Raven Software added a new feature to Call of Duty: Warzone that allowed players to select and customize their loadouts in the pre-match lobby. However, players noticed a bug after the feature was rolled out. Some players were able to join matches already equipped with the best weapons and attachments, giving them an unfair advantage over others.
The addition of this new feature also triggered a bug that allowed players to mute their footstep sounds. Raven Software had no choice but to remove this new feature, promising to re-enable it as soon as the bug was fixed. But something tells us that if regression testing had been performed, this problem wouldn't have occurred.
Tesla
Another company that could have benefited from a non-regression test is none other than Tesla. Following an update on October 23, 2021, the automaker received numerous reports from customers stating that their cars had falsely identified potential front-end collisions, which triggered the automatic emergency braking system and caused the vehicle to come to a sudden stop.
Tesla reviewed the reports and discovered a communication error in the 10.3 Full Self-Driving beta software. This is a rather dangerous bug, as a sudden stop by the vehicle increases the risk of a rear-end collision and injuries. The automaker quickly ordered a recall of the affected vehicles (approximately 12,000) and released a separate update to fix the software bug. Fortunately, no accidents or injuries have been reported.
NHS
Four hours: that’s how long the mobile app and website of England’s National Health Service (NHS) were down, preventing users from proving their COVID vaccination status. As a result, many British passengers were stranded at airports, with some unable to board their flights and others facing delays. Although this IT outage lasted only four hours, it caused a great deal of frustration and, according to many experts, highlighted the problems inherent in a single centralized system.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
After TikTok, it was Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s turn to go down and spark outrage among their users on October 4. Throughout the evening, it was impossible to send or receive messages on these social media platforms. And if you typed “Facebook” into a search engine, the page couldn’t be found.
According to the American media outlet The Verge, an emergency intervention was even required at one of the Facebook group’s data centers to restore service, which means the fix could not be performed remotely. The bug is reportedly due to a change in the configuration of the routers that coordinate traffic between the group’s various data centers, which caused the services to go down.
LCL
Would you like to find out that other people were able to access your bank account? No? Yet that’s exactly what happened to several LCL customers on February 23, 2021. For one hour, several hundred customers were able to access the accounts of other users of the bank’s app. They could view expenses, savings balances, different accounts, and more. Fortunately, it wasn’t possible to perform transactions on the accounts whose data was displayed, nor to access the account holder’s personal information, but this remains a critical incident.
What caused it? Not a cyberattack, as some might have thought, but a technical glitch related to an app update. Until it was fixed, the mobile app had to be temporarily suspended. Not only did this bug affect customers whose accounts were accessible, but also those who were unable to perform transactions during that time. Or how to undermine the company’s credibility and users’ trust…
Automated testing to detect bugs faster!
As we’ve seen in these various examples, sometimes all it takes is a single bug to bring an entire website or mobile app to a standstill, resulting in disastrous consequences for the company’s image, reputation, and credibility—as well as considerable financial losses. If you don’t want to find yourself in one of these situations, you need to detect bugs before your users even notice them and report them. And to do that, you have two complementary solutions.
The first is to make quality a core part of your application, so you can identify bugs that need to be fixed at the right time—that is, before the application goes live. The second is to implement automated testing. This allows you to run more tests more frequently, thereby identifying bugs faster and fixing them more quickly—before your users even notice them or have time to complain.
A bug in the LCL banking app allowed users to access other customers' accounts – Le Parisien
Global Facebook Outage: What Happened? – Siècle digital
The 10 Biggest Software Bugs and Tech Fails of 2021 – Testdevlab
