Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

An opinionated year-end review of 2024’s tech misfires, covering Oracle’s project and licensing controversies, the Internet Archive’s cyber attack and ensuing record-label lawsuit, large-scale outages affecting Meta, Instagram, and CrowdStrike, muted uptake of Apple’s Vision Pro, turmoil and regulatory clashes around X/Twitter, backlash against Microsoft’s Copilot/Recall privacy model, stalled progress in autonomous vehicles highlighted by GM’s Cruise retreat, and the shutdown of the cloud-dependent Moxie children’s robot.