The top 2024 tech moments
- The year one software company brought the world to a halt
The biggest technology story of the year has to be the CrowdStrike outage in July. A rogue software update by the US cybersecurity company crippled up to eight and a half million computers using Microsoft systems around the world. It meant doctors couldn’t treat patients, people were stranded as planes couldn’t get off the ground, and small businesses lost much-needed sales. CrowdStrike said it was “deeply sorry” but is still dealing with the fallout. The saga exposed the fragility of our systems and showed that pen and paper still matter in an IT crisis.
- Scarlett Johansson vs OpenAI
There were some big leaps forward for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2024, but more than a few failures. In May, for instance, actress Scarlett Johansson said she was left “angered” after OpenAI launched a chatbot with an “eerily similar” voice to her own (it denied cloning her but removed the voice). Others in Hollywood warned their voices had also been pilfered using AI. Elsewhere, McDonald’s was forced to remove the AI-powered ordering technology from its US drive-through restaurants after a series of bizarre errors (bacon topped ice cream anyone?). And Microsoft’s Recall tool was temporarily withdrawn after being called a “privacy nightmare”. Tech firms will need to resolve these issues if they want AI to go mainstream: right now, very few of us actually use it on a regular basis.
- Musk implants a wireless chip in someone’s brain
It was a good year for innovation and in particular Elon Musk. In January he revealed his Neuralink company had successfully implanted one of its wireless brain chips in a human – although it is debatable how new this tech is. Then in September, his firm SpaceX amazingly managed to catch its Starship rocket booster as it returned to Earth after launch. We also saw the world’s biggest 3D printer whir into action, robot dogs patrolling Mar-a-Lago, and an electric car battery being charged in under five minutes – not to mention Swiss scientists discovering a way to make chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit and no sugar.
- Hunt for Bitcoin’s elusive creator hits another dead-end
Cryptocurrencies have soared in 2024 amid hopes that Donald Trump will relax industry regulations. But we are still no nearer to discovering the elusive creator of Bitcoin, thought to go by the name Satoshi Nakamoto. In November Stephen Mollah was the latest person to claim the title, but as we discovered at an exclusive press conference in London, he had absolutely no evidence to back this up. In October, crypto expert Peter Todd also denied claims he was the real Satoshi Nakamoto. And in March, a judge ruled that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright had nothing to do with it.
- X users jump to Bluesky
Since Elon Musk helped get Donald Trump elected, millions of users of his social media platform X have apparently left and joined Bluesky, a newish platform that looks like the old Twitter (Meta’s Threads has also grown sharply). Bluesky is meant to be “friendlier” than X but has already made some boo-boos, such as when its boss forgot how old you needed to be to use the site. That won’t go down well in Australia, which has decided to ban under-16s from using social media from late next year. The UK is considering a similar move, although some doubt the restrictions will work. Certainly, harmful online content remains a massive issue – as the BBC’s Zoe Kleinman found when she met former moderators who were left traumatised by their work.
