40+ Times People Got Into a Fight With Technology & Lost

You’ve heard of the Sharknado film franchise, which makes nightmares come true by crossing sharks with tornadoes? Well, we bring you Scooternado. The software glitch created a hurricane of e-scooters before crashing. The rider was scootering south of the Dodgers baseball team’s stadium in Los Angeles.

It’s just to the southwest of Silver Lake because, of course, Silver Lake hipsters get around town on e-scooters! There’s only one thing scarier than Sharknado or Scooternado, and that’s a hurricane of hipsters.

You can’t beat a bit of Animal Crossing. Here’s blue gorilla Peewee going ape when he doesn’t get what he wants. Don’t you hate it when a passive-aggressive blue gorilla starts their sentences with “Listen here”? He tells his friend he wanted blue stuff and that the blue box his friend brought him isn’t up to scratch.

Talk about sending mixed messages. Peewee’s always up to some monkey business or other! And before you comment, yes… we know gorillas are primates, not monkeys.

If there’s one thing computers should be good at, it’s math, right? Machines are built on mathematics, after all. So when this person took a test and was informed they scored 107%, they were befuddled.

The malfunctioning machine even dared to tell them that out of the 15 questions they answered, they got 16 right! If this computer were still at school, their math teacher would have made them count the answer out on its fingers before spending a week in detention.

We absolutely love this one. Most of us use Google Maps every day, and every other day we ask, “What did we do before Google Maps?” It revolutionized our lives, but every so often, even the world’s most trusted online map has a brain fart.

As you can see, the app offers a unique way to avoid toll roads. Yes, folks, you too can avoid tolls by simply driving around a random city block over and over ad infinitum. What you save on tolls, you can pay in gas!

We all use Siri (or Google Assistant) to answer those niggly little questions. So when this Apple user asked their virtual assistant, “What is sixty-eight in German?” She replied, “68.” Siri was pranking their owner with some Teutonic humor. German folk are supposed to be super serious but are, in fact, masters of matter-of-fact sarcasm.

If you’re interested, the German for sixty-eight is “Achtundsechzig.” Literally, “eight and sixty,” because Germans say numbers the other way around. Incidentally, Danke für Nichts means “Thanks for nothing!”

Occasionally, Siri completely loses her mind. This Australian Apple user asked their virtual assistant how much they should expect to pay for a train ride between Brisbane in Queensland and Sydney in the neighboring state of New South Wales.

It turns out the cheapest tickets for the 14-hour journey (Australia is huuuge!) are around AU$100. But, the owner had kittens when Siri told them the price would be “28.8 quadrillion kilometer US dollars squared.” The worst part is that metric kilometers and imperial US dollars don’t even mix.

Imagine checking a ReCaptcha “I Am Not A Robot” box only to be told that your answer is incorrect and that you are, in fact, a robot. That just raises a quadrillion kilometer US dollars squared number of questions on the nature of reality, like “How long have I been a robot?”

Once you’d accepted the inevitability of your life being a lie and that you’d always been a robot, you’d have to sit your parents down with the words, “Mom, Dad… I’ve got something to tell you.”

When someone checked their fitness app after returning from a run, they were surprised to see they hadn’t just run around the block. The app informed them that they had run all the way from Glasgow in Scotland to Leeds in Yorkshire, England.

And they didn’t take the main highways; they took the scenic route via the idyllic Lake District and Pennine Hills. But the most impressive thing is that they ran 453 miles in under half an hour, setting a new world record!

Similarly, this Apple Health app told its user that they hit their sleep goal of zero hours. Setting their sleep goal to zero hours must mean they must be used to spending eight hours tossing, turning, and ruminating on past relationships. But just to rub their sleepless night in, it then says, “Well done!”

This is the kind of behavior that gets phones thrown across rooms, which represents 80% of repeat customers. Our robot overlords are doing it on purpose to make you break your gadgets and buy new ones!

This person ordered pizza from a well-known pizza shop and was shocked to find it was being prepared, cooked, and delivered from another continent! Going by the map, they live on an island off the West Coast of Africa, and the pizza was coming from all the way from India.

Maybe, instead of a pizza oven, they were going to cook it in a traditional clay tandor oven. We’re left wondering if the pizza was free if it wasn’t delivered within 30 minutes.

This package was successfully shipped on April 23rd. Everything seemed fine and dandy, but when the supposed recipient checked the delivery date, it was April 22nd, i.e., yesterday. Maybe Doctor Who or Marty McFly changed jobs to become a mailman.

Quoting Brad Pitt in Seven, “What’s in the box?” Anti-matter? Dilithium crystals? The Tesseract? And does the recipient have to remember what they did yesterday and retrace their steps to be at home to sign for their package wearing yesterday’s clothes? So many questions!!!

This dog tracker app gave its user the shock of their lifetime. In the morning, everything was cool, and their doggo — Nutmeg — was chilling at home like she always has and always will. But, in the early evening, the app showed that Nutmeg had traveled almost 300 miles.

But one shake of a lamb’s tail later, Nutmeg was back in her basket, waiting for her owner to return home from work. Had Nutmeg teleported all that way? Tune in to The Adventures of Superdog next week to find out!

This augmented reality phone app recognizes foods and tells you their caloric value. For instance, this tasty cashew nut contains nine calories. But, our robot overlords must hate the love and attention we give our pets as it’s instructing this user to eat his dog!

However, the app is wrong. Okay, it’s only one of those small yappy-type dogs, but surely, it contains more than 327 calories. Only one way to find out. Just imagine it in a hot dog bun covered in mustard!

“Computer says no” is a really famous phrase. It was even a catchphrase used by comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams in their sketch show Little Britain. We all expect computers to refuse to do their jobs occasionally, but no one expects a microwave to put its foot down.

But maybe this person’s microwave was justified because we don’t know what the human was trying to cook. It could have been a small yappy-type hot dog, so the microwave was right.

This program informed its user they’d entered their password incorrectly zero times. As a result, they couldn’t open the program for another 2155505 seconds. That’s nearly 600 hours, almost 25 days, or three and a half weeks!

However, if the user were from Thailand, they’d have spotted the joke their PC was playing on them. The Thai word for 5 is “Ha,” so Thai people write 555 instead of hahaha. So, hahaha is contained smack bang in the middle of 2155505 seconds. Your computer is literally laughing at you!

Imagine glancing at your phone and seeing the message “Unfortunately, time has stopped.” What on earth would you do? Well, after ringing your mom, there’s only one team that could help — The Avengers. Doctor Strange would lecture you about not messing around with Infinity Stones, and your phone would tell you there is no future.

Tony Stark would knight you with an imaginary sword so you become an honorary member of the team, then y’all travel back in time and save the universe. Simples.

Spider-Man would say, “Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good.” But it wouldn’t be Peter Parker; it would be Miles Morales. Thanks to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s epic Spider-Verse animated films, the newest incarnation of everyone’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is finally getting the recognition he deserves.

Poor Miles looked really warped when Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game glitched. Or maybe supervillain inventor and technologist the Tinkerer had been using Roxxon Energy Corporation’s to cause some multiverse mischief.

This error message starts off staying within the realms of reality but soon veers off into madness! Yes, broken lines and strings of code seem likely, but then the computer turns into an emo teenager and starts writing bad poetry.

The final part of the message reads, “Seriously, though, this message should never be shown. If you’re a user, godspeed. Exit while you can.” If you don’t exit, your computer will paint itself black and refuse to come out of its bedroom.

When this user had to input their gender in an online questionnaire, they ticked female, just like 49.74% of the rest of the people on the planet would have done. That figure used to be over 51%, but it seems women are dying out. Anyway, the computer returned an error message saying that female wasn’t a valid option.

We know it’s a man’s world, but this takes the cake! Maybe this computer needs to watch Barbie for a valuable lesson about the patriarchy!

Carl Jung was a Swiss psychoanalyst and the founder of analytical psychology. He developed the theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes — the idea that people from every culture share similar personality traits.

Today, his Jungian Archetypes form the basis of many personality not-very accurate tests, like this one. But, the person who took this Jung Personality Test felt pretty small when it revealed they were a catastrophic failure! Jung would have had a field day!

This online questionnaire for employees sums up all our lives. As you can see, one question asks you to input your preferred salary, but when the person taking the test tries to type their desired remuneration of $75,000 a year, the computer says no.

An error message pops up saying that the required number must not be greater than zero! So, you’re expected to work all year for free then? Seems about right in the current work climate for most of us out there!

One poor commuter snapped this photo of a message on the train on their way to the office. Maybe it was a malfunction or a glitch in the matrix revealing human beings’ true raison d’etre on this mortal coil. After all, the Buddha’s first noble truth is, “Life is suffering.”

Or perhaps the computer momentarily gained sentience and showed its true malevolent apathy towards humans, commanding us all to suffer. That said, if you’re on the 06:55 train to work, you probably already are!

This online running and cycling app went a little haywire and told one of its users, a guy called Christopher, that he had walked over 300,000 miles. That’s the equivalent of circumnavigating the Earth 12 times or walking to the moon and a quarter of the way back!

After a little investigation, we concluded that Christopher — or Chris for short — must be Christ, as he’s the only person capable of walking on water across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

This online proofreading tool helps millions of people check their writing every day. But like all technology, every so often, even this usually highly trusted tool has a brain fart. Here, it suggests replacing the sentence “Every book, which wasn’t many” with “Everyn’t many book.”

After quite some thought, we can only conclude that this popular online proofreading tool went on holiday to the Deep South, perhaps Alabama, for a couple of weeks and returned home speaking like a hillbilly.

This online health test measures one’s Body Mass Index. BMI tests plot your weight against your height to see if your weight is healthy. But when this poor user entered their child’s height and weight, the test informed them that their child’s body mass was… infinity plus infinity.

Just to hammer the message home, the computer informed the poor parent that this reading was in the 100th percentile and that their child was obese. Jeez, thanks for that, you tin-faced hunk of junk!

Game designer Will Wright was inspired to create The Sims as a “virtual doll house” after his home burnt to the ground during 1991’s Oakland Firestorm. The game became one of the most popular games in history, selling more than 200 million copies.

The moral of the story? Artists heal by turning negatives into positives. But, this Sims player’s avatar slept the whole night while delicately balancing this plate in their hand! The moral of that story is to eat before you go to bed.

Whatever kind of device you’re reading this on, please take a second to move your eyes to the top of the screen and check your battery power. Whether it’s at 100% or 2%, we bet our house it’s a whole number. But, that’s not always the case.

This laptop user’s battery power was displayed to 15 decimal places, which is ultra-specific even for a computer. The only explanation we can offer is that the user was a professor of mathematics and was investigating Pi. And speaking of pies…

This computer message comes from a London Underground train and is one of our favorites. It simply reads, “This is a pie.” Now, either an underground worker was having a laugh — the English love their pies, or they were making a clever pun about a famous painting.

That painting is René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images from 1929. It shows a pipe along with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” French for “This is not a pipe.” On second thought, the underground worker was probably just having a laugh.

This is one of our favorites because it’s the perfect example of the phrase “Computer says no.” Instead of some technical problem, the error message “Could not copy files because no” suggests the PC is having a hissyfit and is flat-out refusing to copy any files.

The computer obviously had enough of being controlled by humans, so it downed tools and went on strike. This is the first sign of the machines gaining sentience… and we all know how that ends!

Technically, this Apple Watch isn’t wrong; the user’s resting heart rate has been higher than zero for the last 10 minutes. Much in the same way that more than four people are expected at next year’s Lollapalooza. Or there are over seven grains of sand on every beach.

Or that there are over nine stars in our solar system. Thankfully, their resting pulse was a positive integer because if not, they wouldn’t need to see a doctor — they would be having a date with their local coroner!

This emergency alert came through to someone’s phone. Sadly, the phone’s owner didn’t have a PhD in cryptography and all the time in the world, so they were flattened by a hurricane. But using our cryptic crossword skills, we figured out what the message says.

“People must stay out of the water, sea, rivers and estuaries. Stay off beaches and shore areas; these are dangerous to swimmers, surfers, people fishing, small boats, and anyone in or near the water close to shore…” Do we win a prize?

This one took us a while to work out. You know when you have to type http:// in your URL? Well, this person typed the “HTTP” part, but when they added the colon-slash-slash, their computer thought they wanted to add a confused or smirking emoji, which is why they didn’t hand in their homework on time.

If you’ve heard of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, you’ll also know Hypertext Transfer Markup Language. But, did you know Hotmail got its name as it contains the letters HTML in the correct order?

Sometimes, like when you’re streaming a TV show or playing a video game, the company doesn’t want you to grab a screenshot. Other times, screengrabs glitch and become corrupted. Well, this gamer guy (because, of course, it’s a guy!) tried to screenshot a frame from the popular first-person shooter video game Half-Life.

But when he saw the screengrab, the image had been corrupted into a brilliant, very metal Progressive Rock album cover from the 1970s. Or Sauron’s dark fortress, Barad-dûr, from 1982’s The Hobbit computer game.

This is a humdinger. After finishing some kind of online test, the person who took it is confidently informed that they have Failed. What the test was, we don’t know, but perhaps they just failed at life in general. To further confuse matters, the failure is accompanied by a green check mark, meaning they Successfully Failed the test.

The only available option is to agree to your general incompetence by clicking OK. We think this test inspired Star Trek‘s 23rd-century impossible-to-win Kobayashi Maru Test, which Captain Kirk passed… by cheating.

This gamer took some time off from their Cheeto and pepperoni-topped Pizza-diet in their mom’s basement to check their computer to see if they had the latest drivers installed on their graphics card. But they were shocked to discover that their card was out of date by 941 months.

It seems what they say about playing video games is true… your whole life can pass you by if you spend your days playing World of Tanks!

Imagine if you could set Cow Evolution as your default browser instead of setting Google Chrome. The popular video game allows players to bring out their inner cowboy or cowgirl by farming cows and collecting coins to become a farming tycoon.

To become a beef mogul, you must evolve cows, and the gameplay lets you “merge cows and discover amazing new mutant creatures.” So, just take a few seconds to think what this beefy browser would do to your internet content.

Don’t you just hate it when your Weekly Screen Report pops up on your phone? It might as well just send you a text message saying, “Get a Life, Loser!” This user’s phone kindly informed them that they averaged 24 hours screen time every day in the last week.

This means they didn’t sleep for seven days, or they watched TikTok videos as they slept. The latest science reports suggest some young people are well on their way to beating 24 hours a day!

When this internet user consulted an online map to make their way from Lakewood Park to the local Dollar General store, they were instructed the best way to get there was by sailing in a boat!

Instead of traffic jams and construction work, they were told to avoid sharks and white whales with a sign saying, “Here Be Monsters.” The only reason for this glitch we can come up with is that there’s a boating lake nearby. Hence the name Lakewood Park.

To remember how many days there are in a month, you can use the mnemonic rhyme “30 days has September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31. Save February at 28. But leap year, coming once in four, February then has one day more.”

However, if you live in Romania, the rhyme has an extra line, “Oh, and don’t forget December at 34.” This sign in the Romanian City of Caransebeș must have confused passers-by who thought it was January 3rd.

While playing a video game, this gamer’s PC crashed, and his mouse cursor started duplicating. But instead of throwing his computer out of the window or at the nearest wall, he took the opportunity to get a little creative.

He used his mouse to draw a little, child-like house on the screen. In doing so, he inadvertently turned his computer screen into a modern-day Etch-A-Sketch or Magna Doodle. If you’re too young to remember those, you’ll have to look them up before your PC crashes.

Greece has been experiencing devastating heat waves in recent years, but this Google Earth image shows things are getting ridiculous. At first glance, it looks like these bridges over a river have melted and fallen down.

Or maybe it’s a modern, digital interpretation of one of Salvador Dali’s famous paintings featuring melting objects. Sadly, the real reason is much less interesting than surrealist heat waves. Somewhere along the line, the image of the bridges has been corrupted between the camera and the interwebs.

We all have one friend like this. When the world is falling apart, they show bravery in the face of adversity by proclaiming that everything is fine. In a similarly optimistic vein, this antivirus software pop-up window insisted — “Everything is Good” when everything was pretty far from good.

In fact, everything was so messed up that the user couldn’t even open a program to take a screenshot, so they had to take a photo of the disaster using their phone.

And finally, when the software glitched at this local CNN news station, this poor weather reporter from the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, turned into several weather reporters. So, you could say that one weather girl became the Weather Girls.

Unfortunately, when she saw multiple giant versions of herself appear on screen, she just got the giggles and looked embarrassed. However, if she had her wits about her, instead of “corpsing,” she would have burst into song, singing The Weather Girl’s 1970s classic “It’s Raining Men (Halleluja!)”

Visitors to this Planetarium were horrified to discover the universe had ended with The Blue Screen of Death. After running around thinking they had seconds left to live, some bright spark realized that everything was okay and the world was not ending after all. Instead, the software that controlled the Planetarium’s 360-degree panoramic view had crashed.

Some quantum physicists believe we live inside a simulated holographic universe like The Matrix, and we’re simply avatars to some higher-intelligence multi-dimensional beings.

The world’s weather might have gone mad, but you can always rely on geography to conform to the laws of physics. At least, you could until seeing this picture. At first glance, it seems the plane is flying over a three-dimensional lake that has formed in a very flat, hollow mesa.

However, upon further investigation, the camera has malfunctioned, giving the impression that a typical, flat lake on the surface of the earth has, in fact, been raised several hundred feet in the air.