12 Bugs of Christmas 2025

Transcript

12 Bugs of Christmas Transcript

 Okay. Hello everybody and welcome to another festive edition of Testing Peers. My name is Beth Marshall and I am joined with a fantastic festive crew this evening in the shape of Mr. David Maynard. 

Hello, 

Mr. Mash gate himself, Chris Armstrong, 

ho, ho, ho, 

uh, Russell Craxford. 

Merry Christmas 

and special guest, Rachel Kibler.

Howdy and Tara Walton. Hello, hello, hello. 

Um, we are still sponsored by nfo. They are a UK based based software testing company. They've been supporting businesses for over 24 years by providing services. They include burst resource, accelerated test automation, performance testing, and a fully managed testing service.

In 2021, they launched the Test Automation Academy and have so far created over 48 jobs for people in the industry in all those years, which is brilliant. If you'd like to contact them, please look at their website@www.nfo.co uk or email them at info at InFocus co uk. 

So in today's episode, we have prepared a little bit of a look back over the last 12 months with Chris's help, and we're gonna be.

Taking a look at bit of banter first, and then we've, we are gonna focus on the 12 bugs of Christmas or the 12 bugs of 2025. So banter, banter o'clock, guys. Christmas festive. This time of the year equals eating to me. What is your favorite festive sweet treat? Who wants to jump in? 

We only have one. 

Well, yeah, we, we, we wanna try and limit this podcast to an hour.

I know. Festive podcast tend to overrun. It depends 

on the day of the week though, right? There's seven days. I could just, well, 

Christmas day, 

Chris. Okay. Chocolate orange. 

Chocolate orange. I'm gonna go Christmas cake. Nice bit of fruit cake with marsy pan and icing on the top. 

And a lot of alcohol on it.

Yeah. Beth's screwing her nose up. Doesn't like that. 

Sweet. 

Mm, it is sweet. 

I would, okay.

And let's not fight. It's Christmas. 

You don't have it with gravy? Part of Christmas? 

No. No. Match cake 2.0. No 

match. 

Gate 2.0. I'm stepping back. Back. We didn't give anyone a veto this year for a reason. 

Russell, go on, hit me. If you're more of a wine man. What? Uh, well, dessert might, would go 

nicely, but, um, I'm the, I'm gotta be the, um, classic.

Um, Terry's chocolate orange has to be wood. Chris, two for 

chocolate. Orange. Yeah, it's a Christmas thing. I dunno why it is. Tara. Rachel, tell me if you've even tried a chocolate orange. 

Yeah, I mean, they're okay. I, I just don't think there's anything that's that fantastic. But my family does make homemade divinity every year for Christmas, and so that's probably, that's the only time of year we have it, so that's probably my favorite Christmas season.

Sweet. I think 

you might need to explain what divinity is. Yes. Yeah. What is that? What actually is that? It's quite American, I think. 

Uh, is it okay? I don't, it's, it's like a really rich, smooth meringue type. I don't really know how to explain it. It's like corn syrup and egg whites and vanilla and chopped pecans, and it's entirely too sweet, but it's lovely.

I like the sound of that. Rachel, what's 

your 

fave? 

I'm gonna say another very American thing because I don't think you have Hershey kisses. Are they very prevalent in the uk? Heard of them. You do? I've never tried one. I've had them before. Nice. 

I've had them, but they're not very prevalent. 

There's this Christmas cookie that my mom always made growing up.

They're called peanut blossoms, so like a peanut butter cookie. And then you smash a Hershey's kiss in the middle once they come out of the oven. And so then the Hershey's gets a little melted on there and it's just chocolate and peanut butter, and it's delightful. So peanut blossoms and yeah, that makes me sound very, very American.

But Tara's over there nodding. So I feel I've forgot about 

those. And honestly, like hands down, those are delicious. Yes. There we go. Ah, 

that does sound good. That sounds good. I dunno what mine will be. I'm just a traditionalist when it comes to the old chocolate advent calendar. There's something about opening and like really cheap chocolate too.

I don't want a fancy one. I want the cheapest chocolate that money can't buy and that you can add just Oh, enjoy every, every morning without feeling too bad about it. 24 whole days. Yeah. Anyway, we could go on and on about sweet treats forever, but we are here to talk about bugs. Yeah. We talk about food.

I'm hungry now. 

Hopefully No bugs in the candy. 

Yeah. Chocolate bugs, chocolate cockroaches and 

things. They're nice. 

I'm joking. 

Oh, 

chocolate crickets. 

Yeah, they might, they might increase in popularity in the next few years. You never know. Yeah. When we've got no water left. So we've had a 2025, I don't know if anyone agrees, but I think it's been quite, quite the boogie year this year.

I know we've had a few episodes on things like, maybe not festive language, but um, certification. How things, again, a little bit worse maybe, and that it's becoming more acceptable for things to be worse. But there have been some, um, highlights or low lights see them as you wish. I guess if you weren't part of them, you can sit back and laugh at them as we are about to do, if you were part of them.

We don't take this personally. I'm sorry for you. We can probably feel your pain with some experiences of our own that may or may not have made it to the press. 

It probably wasn't your fault. 

Yeah. You have our sympathies. So we've had a think about the 12 bugs of Christmas. We're gonna try and get through as many as we can in the time that we've got.

So I apologize in advance if people start. Having a healthy discussion, we might let that run and run and run. We might be here all, all night. You might still be listening to this episode on Christmas Day. Just I'll just warn you, the first bug we are gonna focus on, which will come as probably no surprise if you are someone that's, that keeps on top of these things in the press, is the massive cloud outage.

So they are probably, which 

one 

of a few of these. Yeah. Which have happened. Which have happened in 2025. What does everyone think about those? 

I don't think you have to be, uh, a part of the headlines to know when that one affected everybody because there was inevitably something you were trying to do that day.

That you just magically couldn't or were secretly hoping that you couldn't. Like when Microsoft went down for only some people and we were all like, please let me not be able to log onto teams today 

when Slack had problems because of the same sort of outages. Yeah. 

Jira had a big outage as well. So any folks who are working with any tools that rely on jury or confluence and my hearts go out to um, our friend Danny Ton who had to give a demo that day for Postman and nothing was working.

Yeah. Not a good day for a demo. So what was it this year the Microsoft had massive out eight outages. AWS had massive outages and the press went wild on everyone being like focused on a few suppliers in the, just like, it's, it's a really hard problem to solve 'cause you do get embedded in certain cloud infrastructure and you can have backups and backups and, but then you costs spiral and then it's all about how often do they have them.

Kind of monopolized clouds into what, three or four really large providers. So when one of them has a bad day, ooh, there goes a fourth of the internet. 

But also if you're distributed across multiple, uh, cloud instances, then when one of those, when one of them goes down, something is down for you. Like you're just, you're mitigating your risk, but you're also always down.

Yeah, depending on what's down. 

Unless it can spin up your instance of some, let's say your, your login service in a different provider, depending upon which one was available at the time. But that's incredibly expensive engineering for very critical dependency type systems. And if I'm honest, login type ones would seem to be quite useful for that.

'cause they're the ones that seem to be the gateway to everything. If you can't log in, pretty much nothing in this world works. You know, if you, if you've got microservices and part of the service doesn't want, you can generally get something out of it. But if you can't get in, then you generally can't do anything.

But yeah, it's, it's an expensive thing. And I dunno, many companies that aren't invested in one or maybe two, but not many, are spread across everything. And that sort of level of resilience is expensive, I think is the best way I can describe it. To test in every infrastructure, test it and build it in every infrastructure is not cheap, but they do have good uptime services.

See it's 99.5% is their uptime. And um, that's, that, that sounds really good, doesn't it? Until those eight hours are out at the same time. 

Yeah. But you dunno how, how many times they, they're actually fighting this all the time. And you know, as we say that the, the percentage of time that it does go through, obviously it affects so many other people.

And obviously it's the biggest media, uh, coverage that it has because it affects so many people. But as with most of it is these sort of things, they're probably being targeted such a lot of the time. So actually when you look at the bigger picture, actually, it's fairly stable and it's only those odd occasions, but it ha can cause catastrophic, uh, repercussions.

All it has to do is be a mainstream service or mainstream thing that's common and or go why? Because often, as you said, David, they're actually having little issues with say a SQL server type service or something like that. There's often little things that happen on different types of their services.

It's very rare that you get. Huge, broad things. And when it happens, it's generally DNS, it's generally updates of something. It's generally configuration changes, um, networking trafficking rather than necessarily a bit of software that's gone a bit haywire, but not always. 

Do you think the, the big takeaway for me was, uh, digging a little bit more into the transparency of some of the services that I use because I don't directly use anything that's on AWS, but those things may or may not.

And so all of a sudden this three step down the process and all of a sudden my stuff doesn't work. Was a little like, oh, are you, are you hosted on that thing? 

I, I dunno about anyone else, but when these things happen, I get a little bit obsessed with the down detector website and it becomes a, a little bit, it's like a testers.

Do you know when, when you look at property websites, if you're, when you are not even thinking about moving, you just get into the habit of looking, oh, there's a new house. Oh, well, as soon as I hear there's been some kind of cloud outage, that's it. Down detector. Tell me what's broken. I think it's a bit Ard and Freud, but it, it is interesting, like you say, Tara, to see all of the different services that you thought, Ooh, I did not think that relied on the US east region of AWS Okay.

Yeah. It's interesting when it, it is something like that because it. You kind of, you, you understand Start learning, as you said, what's reliant upon what, and it kind of gives you a little insight into the infrastructure behind the services. I'm not sure that's a good thing security wise though, but I don't think there's a way around it to a degree.

I do think the, the postmortems that they have to publicly provide after these things is, is maybe a useful kind of insight on the sort of things that we might need to prepare for and have some of that information ourselves in our day jobs and start thinking about these things. Has anyone changed anything as a result of these outages or is, is anyone aware of any, any changes?

I definitely pulled some of my courses off of SCORM hosting and into local storage

just so that we could access them later if needed. 

Sounds for lack a wise move. Okay, so is everyone happy to move away from step away from the cloud outage? Alright, let's look at what's next. So the second one on the list is, it's a little more about downtime actually, but this time it's the impact on social media platforms.

So how, or has anyone been impacted by the social media platform downtimes that happened in 2025? I seem to think, uh, Twitter, or sorry, X was down for a considerable amount of time, as was Insta Facebook. They've all had their moment, haven't they? Chris? 

I was, um, at the turn of the era, a, a job hunter, and when LinkedIn was down, I sort of sat there and went, um, cool.

What am I supposed to do now? So obviously I dedicate more time to organizing the Testing Peers Conference, which is in March 12th, 2026. Everybody listening, see you there by tickets available. Testing Peers com.com. But no, honestly, LinkedIn being down absolutely like ruined my day 'cause I couldn't look for jobs and, and try to look active on the internet, which was problematic for me because I don't go on X anymore and Blue Sky just doesn't have the same Z 

say, this sounds really bad from somebody who's spent the last few years as a community manager.

But I didn't notice when social media went down 

did, oh, I must be too far away from it these days. 

I stopped too far away from it and, and honestly, for my own mental health, it's been kind of good. So when I do hear random things about like, oh my God, Instagram went down, I'm like, oh, okay. 

Yeah, likewise. It didn't really affect me too much.

I don't remember when it happened. So yeah, 

the world keeps 

turning, doesn't it? It can be impactful though if it goes down during, I dunno, like, um, a mass event, like a hurricane or, um, power outages or something like that. 'cause people do use that to communicate now, um, to share their news, to share what's going on, family events and all that sort of stuff.

So it can be quite impactful. Do you remember earlier this year there was a massive power problem, Portugal, Spain, where the grid went down and power went out for everything else like that. The, the big infrastructure companies had backups and so on, but obviously the phone networks went down so no one could communicate properly and.

Social media was one of the mechanisms that they could use. 'cause they didn't have phone networks, but they did have wifi still and other things that they could do certain things with. So it's all interesting how these things interconnect, I guess, to a degree. But yeah, that was a big, um, issue for this year, wasn't it?

The power outage. 

Here's the question. From a resiliency point of view, would anyone be prepared to pay extra to have the satellite, uh, coverage? Someone can probably explain this better than I can, but essentially if you don't have 5G, 4G, 3G, you can use the, the satellite STARLINK 

type 

thing. Starlink, that's it.

You can use the starlink satellite to get reception wherever you need it. Would anyone be prepared to pay for that service? 

Hence, where I lived, I used to live in rural, in Northumberland and reception was terrible. I probably would if I was in somewhere where I knew the reception was very, very patchy or if I was climbing mountains a lot, but.

I'm in the city, 99.9% of my time. It doesn't seem value for money. 

I think if it was anything but starlink, I might, but I think if it were only starlink, I'd rather learn to use smoke signals 

SE four boom, A mask.

All right. Do you wanna pay Musk more money? A trillion dollars not enough for you? 

I probably wouldn't. I don't like social media as much, so therefore I don't think it wouldn't benefit me at all. 

My partner was at Burning Man this year and I was very, very thankful that he had access to a starlink so that we could actually communicate.

'cause it was, I mean, burning Man, you have thousands of people in a small area, so any wifi or any, uh, starlink was essential for making calls, so I was very thankful that he had it. But as for whether I would pay for it, unlikely. 

I think that's fair though. Interesting. That's a, that's kind of a different situation when you know you're gonna be out somewhere overloaded remote.

It's that like, I'm climbing a mountain, I, for my own personal safety. Sure. But for day to day backup redundancy, probably not. 

Yeah. I dunno. Anyone that couldn't survive without not being on the internet for half an hour, you know, I don't, I don't think that's gonna be the end of anybody, is it? 

I do, but I know a lot of gen alpha kids, so 

Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Teenagers 

maybe. 

Okay, so someone's gonna need to explain this next one to me 'cause I'm a little lost. So, uh, bug of the ear. Number three is the viral AI hallucination, and I've got, for example, the seahorse emoji. Can anyone shed any light on this? 

Yeah, Chris's favorite 

topic. 

I mean, I saw it on online and got a bit excited when I saw it.

It was, um, who was it? It was shared by, uh, Saskia. Couplands Shared, so you could ask chat GPT. What, uh, is, is there a seahorse emoji and chat GPT. I'll drop it in the chat for, for your, your friends. Now, just a, a snippet of what it's, because this is just, just for our own, uh, delighting dedication, but basically chat GPT in its great wealth and delight of wanting to actually, uh, please you, and it's done in Kruger effect.

Just couldn't quite say no, a seahorse emoji doesn't exist and kept on trying to push it. So I've dropped a little, a little example of the chat where, where chat GT's responding and going a little bit mad, mad. We'll, we'll reference this in the show. Know this a bit probably. Yeah. Oh, but it gives 

everything unicorns and dragons and coral.

And it can, it went through all of them, I think. 

I mean, it didn't stop. It's 

been fixed now, isn't it? 

Yes. Yeah, it was, it, yeah, it was a, it was a bug. It got a lot, it drove a lot of people to chat. GPT, I'll be honest. And, uh, I posted it in our, our testing peer Slack. And a bunch of different folks tried, other AI models went down for, um, co-pilot generated one for itself because it said, oh, there isn't one.

Would you like me to make one? So it was all, it was all quite hilarious, but it didn't stop. It could literally like brick the machine. If someone just like, you can imagine like kids think things are funny, they could have left it going and chat. GPT just refused to stop. When you asked made that query, it would just carry on, add infinitum.

So if you bought like token, you were paying like on a token by token basis on a particular level, I mean the costs could have been quite catastrophic. 

Mm. And to be fair, it's using power and resources regardless of anything else, 

which is really unsustainable cost. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

And I wonder how much of chat GBT, particularly in the early days, but certainly in 2025 still, how much of chat GPT and the likes use is people trying to.

Catch it out, you know, best it, um, find issues like this, find problems that it, that it has. They love it. 

I think they love it. Yeah. 'cause it drives more people towards it to give stuff a go as well. Like, it's, it's like, like leaning into like a viral sensation where everyone's driven towards their own 

or publicity's good publicity, isn't it?

You see, you 

see, you see people like posting prompts and uh, you know, you're welcome and stuff. And I was a hundred percent drawn on this one because I found it hilarious. It worked. 

You talk about like publicity and all this sort of stuff. Do, do you know when Chat GPT Model five came out, it got jail broke within one day.

It was when people found a way to get around it and to kind of get it to do things it wasn't meant to do and all the rest of it. Again, publicity and also, you know, getting users to find problems is a great way of, uh, discovering the limitations and 'cause it's such a viral thing. It's not done under the radar, it's done publicly.

It, so it means you can patch the, the problems versus exploited. 

So do we call that, um, community testing? Like were you, you know, pushed out to community and let them test it or are we just saying this needed to be tested better before you released it? 

Probably a combination of all, but like many things, infinite number of users will find infinite ways of doing things.

So whilst you can go for the most obvious and things, someone will always find an abstract different way. So it's one of those challenging things, but I think it's good that they're responding and fixing when they, things become apparent. And that's kind of what you want. You want responsiveness rather than just ignorance to the problems so that they do fix them.

And that's a good thing. But yeah, it's, it's hard because it's all about learning, isn't it? It's gonna be constantly changing. You can't test every permutation of everything, as we all know. So I think, do they do a good enough job that's debatable. Um, you know, there's definitely been lots of things in the news hasn't there about.

The feedback and information that's given to users that have led them into sort of mental health crisis and all sorts of different things. So there's definitely some, um, boundaries that haven't been put in that probably should have been, but you give 6 billion people access to some tool, I guarantee you'll find ways you can't think of.

So it's all about doing the, a good enough job, isn't it really? 

Yeah, I think the, um, I wouldn't, I wouldn't wanna start to count the number of lawsuits that I read about against various, various companies. I mean, social media included this year. But this year there's definitely been a, an increased focus on the, just the sheer volume of people that are using this stuff now.

I mean, vibe coding was the Collins Dictionary word of the year. This is. Absolutely broken the fourth wall into, into the mainstream, hasn't it? I mean, really realistically, it did that last year, but I think this year it's really ai, generative AI has really embedded itself into, into daily life for a heck of a lot of people.

For better or for worse, really. Sorry. Ho ho, ho festive. 

I, I read an article earlier this, this morning actually, that was talking about how they anticipate more than 50% of the internet at this point in time is actually at least partially AI generated, which of course is just feeding back into the AI machine.

Um, and like if it's eating problems and consuming those problems, or bad information, or bad content or bugs or whatever the case may be. Hmm. Like. Is it getting better, worse, harder to test? 

Harder to tell. Yeah. Earlier. 

Earlier, yeah. Wasn't it though that it ended up corrupting itself on its own data on its own, not quite accurate enough data, so it ended up being a bit more dodgy.

But should we talk about some nice hallucinations? Um, nice. Maybe a bit less serious ones perhaps? Yeah. Um, there was one in the Chicago Sun Tribune, God knows what the name of the paper was exactly, where they had to do a list of, um, books to read over the summer. And, um, a reporter just asked Chat, GBT or an equivalent, and it made up books and titles.

So a published article went out there with made up titles and things that no one could find. And that's. Why you don't just blindly trust ai? Because it does hallucinate. It does make stuff up. Vibe, coding. You mentioned it, Beth. Not all the code that comes outta that works. It's a starting point. It's not the end points.

You should always do your research, but yes, I can't imagine people gonna try and find Amazon for books that didn't exist. But uh, hopefully if someone went and wrote them afterwards and they would make a fortune. 

Probably written with AI though, so. Yeah. 

Yeah. They wouldn't watch the listen to listen watch.

Um, they wouldn't read the sequel maybe, but they'd buy the first one 'cause people are like that. So in the paper it must be good. 

I do like the silly hallucinations where AI gets the under misunderstands the context. Like what's the difference between a sauce and a dressing? A sauce goes on food and a dressing is used to apply pressure to wounds.

Things like that. I, that's gentle and just kind of amusing. Not usually harmful can be, but let's not go there. It's just funny. 

Yeah. The number, number four bug I've got here talks about the six finger image generator fails. I certainly think, I don't know, has anyone been, I haven't seen as much around this year of.

Image, kind of people trying to do funny things, generating images. It seems to have, that seems to have gone a little bit down. I dunno how many people are using. Got bored of it, I guess. Ai, yeah, generated images. The 

videos have been a bit more of a thing this year where, where like videos have been created.

I saw a video that was shared a while back where they'd obviously been fed like every episode of friends and then it just sort of transitions into different spaces and, and there, and it doesn't make any sense. And the candle laughter makes even less sense in, in those bits. And, and, you know, the people pop into two and into one and the context is all.

Yes, I saw that all kinds of wrong. Um, it did scare me slightly. I didn't laugh at it at all. I did think, oh dear. 

Did you see the AI generated model that they've, they used a as in like a. A model for photo shoots and clothes and things. And, um, design agency or whoever had spent months crafting this perfect woman to, to model these, model these clothes.

And then she ended up, you know, getting paid jobs and all that kind of thing. And people, people weren't happy about this, that it was replacing normal. 

Are you talking about, um, Tilly Norwood, the actress that, that quote unquote actress, um, she's completely AI generated so much so that's, uh, like our screen actors Guild had to step in and be like, um, excuse me.

Like you cannot hire hire AI when there are people right here. Like, 

do you think that's something we're gonna kind of see more of or do you think people are sort of. Getting over that a little bit and pushing back against, against the AI generated content. Um, 

it's a weird one 'cause we have cartoons and other things that are, are generated.

You know, you don't have to have an actor in everything. So I think like anything, it'll, there'll be genres created that are different. I don't think it's the death of actors. I think you might end up just with different style things. Um, because guess what, an AI actor can do anything stumped wise. You can make a film cheaper.

It doesn't mean it's any good, but it gives a different angle of doing things, I guess is the point. 

And actually we've had films full of CGI and bringing back dead actors and I know they're based on real life people. I think that's the difference between them. But, you know, I don't think it's going to necessarily go away.

I think it's, I think it might well become an norm. You know, I think there'll be more content generated and, and people will. May not guess necessarily get paid for it, but I think it will become more prevalent. 

You said like people in Denmark have been able to sign over their own, like, as in you can retain all their own image rights and stuff now, like AI is not allowed to repurpose their stuff in Denmark, which seems like quite a landmark kind of decision 

anyway.

Should we move away from ai? Where's the, where's our next question? Taking us back. 

So the next, the next quest, the next bug in the 12 bugs of Christmas. We're only on five Stick with us people, but this would be a good one, I think for a few people here. So, day one, game launch disaster, or on the flip side, as I've been reading this week, the, let's tell all our customers that have repaid for something that they're not gonna get it when they think they are.

Anyone wanna talk about some of those? 

I mean, I've got, I I, I wrote down in preparation for this. GTA six and football manager 25, which didn't happen at all. They just literally skipped the entire game and they gave themselves a whole extra year to make Football Manager 26 it launched and everyone went, ha, 

there's a whole new games engine, isn't it, behind that one.

Which is part of the reason it's a very different experience this year. Yeah. I'm just defending them now, 

but they gave themselves a whole extra year. 

Yeah. 

And 

how many projects have you been on when you're given yourself an extra year and all you do is add a lot more features and not actually make any better?

I mean, way more projects than I would like to admit to Russell, honestly. 

Yeah. Even the Horizon Project has been extended for another couple of years, hasn't it? That was a massive success. It's, uh, well, 

yeah, post office a Fortune. 

I, I think particularly in the game industry, it happens. Probably more frequently than in Mo at least more publicly than in most, uh, tech industries, because I can think of probably five off the top of my head that were seriously delayed and some that really probably should have been because they crashed so bad on day one.

Um, but then I always think of classics like Duke Newcombe, which took what forever 

to come out. Which, I mean, do you think people are generally just, they're willing to wait for quality in a way that, that perhaps in the past they, they maybe haven't, I don't 

know anybody I've ever spoken to who is like, give me crap on time rather than good quality stuff later.

Uh, yeah. I'd rather, I'd rather wait, especially if there's transparency from the company saying, Hey, here's why it didn't release. Instead of just, we're not gonna tell you. It's a mystery. It'll come out in December. April, next December, yeah. 15 years later we finally get Duke Newcomb. You know, 

like the prob The problem is though, that if, if you wait to get better quality, then sometimes the expectation is, oh my God, we've waited so long, it'll be even better.

And then there's an element of disappointment. That's a communication piece though, David. It absolutely. I agree. But, but managing expectations. Yeah. But there, there is that sort of buildup that you expect because there is a delay, you expect better, but it might just be what was expected, just the extension of the timeline.

Yeah. I think for companies there's a big fear of, uh, being beaten to the punch. So they're willing to go fast just to get something out there so that they can be first, but then again. To go back to the Sweetss theme, uh, Hydrox was first to the punch with, uh, what we now eat as Oreos. Just no one remembers that Hydrox was not first.

It's, it's very true. And, and, and sticking on the computer game theme, the Sega Satin launched on the same day as the Sony PlayStation at E three. And they, they said it's available right now at the retailers, which they didn't tell the retailers they're about. And they launched their price and the Sony PlayStation launch they had, they, they went next and they just undercut 'em on price.

The, the guy doing the launch literally just said the price. They were a hundred dollars cheaper and everyone just stood up and was like applauding, like satin were first the first to the market killed by PlayStation straight away. 

Lots of factors, 

isn't it? 

But yeah, 

that is dirty, odd. Years ago. 

I hadn't heard that story.

That's wild. 

Problem with games is there's so much on the market you can, and so many different things. So yeah, big brands, GTAs, you know, call of duties, those sorts of things. You kind of, you expect it to be bug free, high quality, all these things. But if you wanna play a game, you can find quite a lot of them of different styles and classes.

Now, quite easy to find, 

um, not to come back to ai, but aren't we in the same position with that? Everybody's trying to crank out the next shiny AI feature as quickly as humanly possible. 

If you don't have an AI feature, you don't have a product, even if the feature makes no sense. Let's just make a new feature called it the AI button.

This goes to number six. 

Number six, okay, the OS update that bricked devices. 

It was like July last year, wasn't it? Um, CrowdStrike was the one that ruined a lot of people's Microsoft Auto update. 

Oh, blue screen of dead. Yep. Took airports down around the world, 

except for that one airline that was like, we're still running stuff that's too old.

I remember that. 

I think we move on to seven. Let's go. 

Okay. Okay. No one wants to talk about OS updates. That's fine. It's Christmas. The public communications fail viral tweets or press release errors. Have there been any clangers there this year? 

I mean, it's, it is not quite, I think, I think it fits there.

There was that Coldplay gig wasn't there with that CEO and his, his HR person. 

Yes. Yeah, that 

was, that was through Tech company wasn't It was, yeah. It was. All I'm gonna say is there's a lot of tweets that come out. Certain individuals that are um, need fact checking, I think is probably the best way of saying it.

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of communication, but it doesn't seem to harm their, um, 

alternative facts. Yes. Yeah. 

Truth, 

truth, yes. 

Maybe we need a social media platform for the truth. 

Yeah. Oh 

God. 

There was, there was a thing also, I think a lot of, um, a lot of influencers who got paid by that Chrome plugin honey, to, to have like a little code like honey's, one of those ones that trolls the web for voucher codes to, to save you money on things.

And there was a whole sort of thing where people would install her and it would basically like erase the. Code that was shared by the influencers to the influencer, wasn't retaining any of the money for their link. It was a whole iCal meta thing. And honey were basically using them to drive, drive traffic and then ignoring them and suppressing the traffic that was coming from those people, wiping it out as they applied different voucher codes.

I mean, it was, that's, that's back to your certification kind of stuff. They did the dirty on all the people who were getting, um, like carburetor links or whatever they were, they that was, that blew up this year. 

That's affected my life massively. That one, you know, all the social links I post online. 

I was gonna say I hadn't, I hadn't heard about that, but, uh, my kids like, 

Mr.

Beast, what can I say? 

Who,

what is the appropriate response? 

Is he a gladiator or something? 

No, but he has, he has a prime show that he lost money on because he decided he wanted to make it bigger. Number eight. Let's go. 

Okay, let's go number eight. I'm sure people can let us know in the comments of any viral tweets or press release errors that we've forgotten 'cause there must have been a lot this year.

Number eight, the widespread smart device glitch. So think robot vacuums going rogue, smart fridges gone wild, all of that kind of business. Any, any IOT fails this year. 

There was a lot attached to the AWS outage. Um, like those, uh, smart beds that would heat up, they heated up and couldn't be turned off. So people were at like 90 degrees Fahrenheit in their beds and could not turn it smoking.

Yeah. 

So is that the, the, those, um, ring doorbells, do they have an outage this year or like a hack? 

Yeah, ring definitely went down. Yeah, ring went down this year, which is not, which is not great because. Sound detector was showing that ring was offline. And, uh, that, that's maybe a bit of a signal. If you are someone that wanna takes advantage, advantage of these things, go, go, go.

Now's a good time to be naughty. Rings down. 

If I remember correctly, a us Amazon, um, didn't, Amazon or AWS um, did an update to their kind of like smart speakers and things that canceled all the alarms that they set. So it wiped out, um, any alarm that had been set. So people that were using it to wake them up next morning kind of didn't get woken up, which was a slight glitch.

But all of these, all of these are better than waking up to discover a two album has been uploaded to your id. 

You're going back a bit there, Chris. 

I mean, I, I started in the nineties with the Seger hat and the PlayStation. I'm just gonna go for retro. Yeah, 

fair enough. 

I know that, um. I wanna say it was just last week, maybe the week before the Android Auto, um, that is on all the, the smart displays and, and cars right now.

Their latest update was causing it to freeze and crash. And so people that cannot drive without like GPS or, or mid phone call or anything like that, it 

just, in a similar vein with the Teslas, sometimes the screen will just go dark and apparently it's a newly introduced bug where, so when the screen goes dark, you don't know how fast you're going.

You don't know where you're going, you don't have any sensors, you don't hear your turn signal. It's the entire system goes down, but you're still driving. It is terrifying. The definition of going dark. That it sounds like 

Indeed. Wow. So that's not deemed as a, if, if that wasn't working on your car, would it fail?

Its MOT would it fail? Its annual thing? Would they check for these things, do you think? 

I don't know. How do mots do, do do mots? Like the exact same with EVs. They must have a totally different read for it. 

There's sub certain criteria that's the same. 

Yeah. And the state's electric, electric vehicles don't have to do the whole thing.

Yeah. In, in Missouri it's terrifying. If it's less than 10 years old, we don't have to do any of that at all. What, 10 years? 10 years. Wow. I 

think I'm shipping mil bangers over there. I'm terrified. 

Missouri. We make stuff up. It's fine. 

Live on the wild side. 

And making the list in 2026 is the Missouri car dealerships with their massive books that they've introduced.

Um, number 10, number The major 

number nine. Number 

Oh number. Have we missed? Nine? Oh, we've missed nine. I'm so sorry. Number nine. Thank you for keeping me on, on track. Uh, the annual e-commerce crash. So the thing that literally everyone sees coming still crashing websites, what happens this year? Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift Oasis ticket.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's not talk about your vision, Chris. 

Don't get me there. I tried four times.

Yep. 

Oh, podcast downloads as well that they crush every year Christmas episode. Of course. 

Yes. We well know. I really am a particularly a fan of these, um, load balancing issues and security issues when everyone on the entire planet is screaming and waving and saying, we still need to fix this. It's still a problem.

We know it's going to happen on X eight date. You know, especially with like Taylor Swift, it releases at this date and time. It will crash at this date and time, and they all go, it'll be fine. 

I know this is a little, a little dated, but I'm gonna go slightly retro. Uh, when the Queen passed, like the BBC knew, the BBC knew that they were going to be bombarded with traffic on the queen's passing and, uh, still crashed.

Just everything went down. 

Mm-hmm. And it's how kind of the, the. I love when they sort of do exposes now, and a lot of the exposes seem to be around technology, so it's around things like, how are Ticketmaster allowed to sell so many of their tickets to bots or to ticket touts? How come World Cup tickets don't go to true fans?

They go to, uh, you know, people in different countries that have different legislation and could buy up tickets on mass. There seems to be a lot of these kind of tech buggy exposes around at the minute. Anyone got any other, any other things about that?

That'll be a no. We're, 

we're all desperate for number 10. 

We are desperate for number 10, but yeah, I might have to look, keep a little bit quiet for this one. Citing citing slight conflict of interest, but okay. Number 10, the major financial service glitch. Have there been any crypto fails? Banking app failures?

The stuff we all rely on day to day? Yeah. I, 

that's gone wrong. No. Back in summer, June, July, there was a private student loan company, um, here in the States that had AI driven underwriting, that had very discriminatory practices, and I believe there was a multimillion dollar settlement that came out of that.

If I'm remembering correctly, 

it's a bit scary with those sorts of things. My, the, the, the, um, the football team whose Christmas jump primary today, Cambridge United became the first professional football team to do 100% of the professional contracts for their players and to end through ai. I haven't heard of anything.

Yeah, I signed it. Well, because obviously Cambridge is famous for academia and such, and so they sort of partnered with someone to do all these things. I can't imagine it's foolproof. I'm a bit worried about what's gonna happen, but because it's Cambridge United and let's face it, Tara and Rachel have never heard of Cambridge United.

It's not, that's, it's not something that's going to sort of transcend the news. It's not a medical company. 

Just to be fair. A fourth 

tier just about professional football team isn't really going to make it into the news. 

But um, yeah, going back to the sort of financial and banking as well, rather than football, just 'cause we all love Cambridge United.

There was, um, a government research done at the start of this year, which basically looked into banking failures in the UK banking sector. And it basically said in the last two years there's been about 30 days worth of downtime because of banking app failures, 'cause of the banking systems, 'cause of the technology stacks.

Lots of different things, changes that have gone out, the co-op. Um, some of the banks, uh, NatWest are the ones itself have had issues and things like that. 'cause a lot of the infrastructure like is really, really old. Some of the systems that you might get a nice shiny front end, um, and shiny way of doing things and changes.

But actually often the payment system behind the scenes or an element of the kind of fraud checks or something like that is hinged on a really old system somewhere. 'cause there is not much money in. We doing what's already there. It's all in actually getting more revenue. So it's kind of working. It stays, and those systems are the systems that we as engineers don't want to touch.

The ones that we know are flaky, the ones that we know, oh, we only change them once every five years. They're the systems that, that are risky because you don't change them very often. And yeah, so every 

five years we've got some here in the states that are run on COBOL still. 

Oh. Um, yeah. I can't say what we've got some things run on, but yes, there's certain things in the UK infrastructure that's run on fantastically up to date systems.

Mm. 

I think the other, the other threat there that has definitely stepped up in the public consciousness and in the, the, the media kind of awareness of it is, is hacking on an on a industrial government sponsored, you know. Global scale now. I think, you know, we saw what happened to Ja uh, Jaguar Landover this year in the uk.

The, the, the knock on effects of that have contributed to our GDP being less than what it was. That's how important that hack was for the British economy this year. You know, a lot of these things, the, the co-op m and s, et cetera, were, were done by the same group. I think that's taken responsibility for, for several attacks.

What do you think that says about the future of, of security and security testing? 

It's gonna get a lot more funding. Um, the more high stream, high news articles they are, the more people are gonna pay attention to it. It's often, and some of these, I think it's been th through third party integration systems that people gain a backdoor into systems that kind of being exposed as one of the weaknesses that people have.

So it's going to elevate the priority of those things. It's gonna give more funding to them. And people like you, layman, are gonna be much more wary of security than they would've been beforehand because it's mainstream news, small hacks that we all worried about in it weren't mainstream news. So no one really general citizens didn't care so much.

But now they've talked about the m and s, they've talked about Jang Andover. It's becoming news and we worry about it more. Whatever's in the news we worry about more in the uk. Um, was it murder rates are down, knife rates of crime are down, yet we worry more about knife crime now than we ever did. 'cause it's in the news more.

And that's the way most things work. It's what we hear worries us more. So it will help funding, I hope. 

But even though we're worrying about it more, um, I mean, I think those of us that are in the testing space worry about those things and the security and, you know, penetration testing and all of those things that we do on a daily basis.

But the, there are people outside of our sphere of influence that it's a passing headline and they still use 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 as their password. And, uh, 

you, you saw the password that they used McDonald's, didn't you? 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, McDonald's. It was McDonald's that dumped like millions of applicant's information because their password was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

And it's like 

admin password 1, 2, 3, 4. Security 

1 0 1 people is still super important. Sorry, 

what was the password for the Louv? It was 

louv. Yeah, it was Louv. Was 

it really? Yeah. Yeah. For the security system surveillance. That's what they say. 

The, the biggest vulnerability in most security systems is the CIS admin kind of passwords.

Still that is the biggest vulnerability to most systems. Still oasp, top 10, all that sort of stuff. It's because humans are the biggest weakness in any system. Mm-hmm. 

We've only got two to go. Let's go number 11, two to 

go. Right. Rapid fire 11. Number 11. If you've been, if you've been with us so far, you might be holding on and waiting for some of these last two.

So, number 11, the personal bug. Uh, your most annoying non-tech life fail this year and the root cause. Wow. I mean, how much time do we have? 

Just 

quick fire around everyone. Epic. Epic 

life fails this year. Join the queue. I packed up my entire house to not move. Yeah. And it was just because when I finally got into that house, I went, I hate it here.

I hate everything about this house and I don't think I can do it. So I'm still in my old house. I'm slowly unpacking boxes. But that was my big, like if I would've done the research and if I would've followed all of the things that you should do when you're moving to a new home, uh, I probably would not have packed up my entire house.

Follow your process. You need, what you need is an AI personal assistant. 'cause I hear they can do a lot of that research for you now and just basically root like, you know, just sort your life out. They, the AI life 

coaches. Yeah. 

Mm. Russell 

I can't think of any, but that's just me and my brain. So I need an AI memory.

I think that's what I need. 

I've got kind of a vulnerable one. I was becoming indispensable on a work project and it felt really good. Even though for like the last decade of my life, I've been like, I do not want to be indispensable. I want to be able to go on vacation. I want to be able to win the lottery.

I want to, you know, be able to do fun things. I don't wanna be indispensable. I wanna do my job best, but not the only one who can do it. So I was becoming indispensable on this project and thinking that I was indispensable on this project, and then I wasn't. I moved teams and it's a great move, but, uh, I got a little bit too, uh, in my own head and thinking that I was smarter than I was and more important than I was.

And, uh, yeah, it was, that was my big fail, just thinking that I was, uh, necessary and turns out. I am able to go on vacation, which is great. I'm gonna frame it like that. That in no way sounds like a fail. That sounds like a win. It didn't feel like a win in the moment 

context, but 

yeah, 

I, I applaud the way you've spun it to be like, turns out I can go on vacation, so I hope you, I hope you get a vacation 

solo cruise in the Caribbean, I believe, when this is airing.

So yeah, really excited about that. 

So cool. I, I had, I had to fail my, um, I went to go and cook a roast dinner and my oven door fell off, so, um, we didn't have a roast in it that day. 

Captain America, just super strong. That's what it's Superman. 

I had, I had, oh, I'll bring the mood down again. But I had not one, but two break-ins this year.

Not one, but two cars got stolen this year. So I guess a bit of a tech fail that I've now overcompensated for my house is like Fort Knox. Um, 

that's why you're moving Beth? 

Yeah. Yeah. All fun. All fun and games. Life hits you with some curve balls sometimes, doesn't it? 

Yeah. I haven't really got anything really big going back to AI and a bit like the six fingers.

So I was going do, I've, I've mentioned quite a few times in the podcast trying to do calisthenics. So I was asking AI to do ask exercises, so it came up with a list of exercises and it helpfully then said, would you like a poster to subscribe exactly what happened. And it was things like planks and things like that.

So I said, um, yes, please. And the quality of the poster. So the plank was sort of. Inverted and then there were hands and feet. There were extra hands and feet on some of it. It was so that that was, that was my experience of getting AI to help me to describe some exercises. And it was just, and suddenly you're like, 

I'm not that bendy.

No, no, definitely not. 

So number 12, the final bug on our list of 2025. No, not the final one. The final one. I guess this is a moment to, to reflect the 12th G gift of wisdom. The overall single biggest lesson the testing industry learned this year, final U unifying year. Unifying summary of the year in quality.

Has anyone noticed any themes? What would your kind of phrase of the year be? 

I was just thinking AI augmentation, not AI replacement. That was my thinking. 

Yeah, I was gonna say, AI has made us more powerful than ever before, but also more dangerous than ever before. 

I was gonna choose a as well. Don't believe everything you read.

Don't 

believe 

hype. 

I, I would say, um, know what you're pushing to production. 

Wow. I'm gonna go way, way easier than that, than Don't forget your basics,

whether it's changing the password or just looking at use cases and edge cases. Like go back to your 1 0 1. 

And what do we think do about next year? Do we think, do we think 2025 has been a positive year? We feeling good about this year, or do we feel like there's a bit of doom mongering going on? Bit of naysaying people aren't happy?

I think there's a moment coming where we're all going to be seeking clarity because the hype has kind of settled, and we're going to be trying to figure out like, okay, what can I really do with this? What do I really care about? That's what I see in my 2026, is kind of letting the 

dust settle. Any other final thoughts, anybody before we wrap up this special festive edition?

There is, there is still opportunity, but with every, with every threat, with every failure, with everything that, that, that you are worried about. There is a way to look to, to spin and, and that might seem harder, more difficult sometimes, but there's always an opportunity to, to learn more, to learn to do stuff with things, to, to sort.

Yeah. A great, a great place 

to do. Some of that learning might be peers con, which is, tell me a bit more about that, Chris. 

Well, for the third time testing, peers are hosting an in-person conference. We've had great fun twice. We've managed to have some sensational speakers give up their time and share their wealth to an audience of people who perhaps would've been priced out of attending in-person conferences.

We've lowered the bar to entry, um, at this moment in time, early Bird has passed, but you can still buy an in-person ticket for 30 pounds on the day to come along. And if that's too much trouble, we have got scholarship tickets and you can contact us@testingpeers.com in order to be able to get access to those things.

It's great. We love conferences. We love the testing community. We love the people. We love the connection. Not something that AI can replace. And um, really we love it. What I have got for you friends as well. And, um, I, I don't think it's gonna work. Um, but I've just shared our 12 books of Christmas in a. A song that won't work in the chat.

Are we doing this? Really? 

AI can do. It should. Well, Rachel's a, Rachel's a fine singer. Perhaps Rachel would like to, to hit us with this brilliant roaming scheme with the, 

oh, the death 

glare that is 

coming. 

Okay. I can try. I'm just gonna do, starting with 12. We're not gonna do 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay. On the 12th day of Christmas, my testers gave to me 12 words of wisdom.

11. Life fails. 10 financial outages. Nine. Ticket master hell holes. Eight. Smart device glitches. Seven PR disasters. Six. Booked computers. Five. Game launch. Four generative AI image gaps. Three seahorse emoji prompts, two social media blackouts and one cloud server outage. Amazing. 

What? Beautiful. Well known for saving us.

Rachel, 

take one for the team there. Took one for the team. That is a reward for anyone that's made it turn to this recording. 

Yeah, well done. You can. It's my ring 

tone now. 

Well, I guess all we've got to say now is have a lovely festive season, everybody. This is, I believe Chris tells me our sixth Christmas episode and hopefully there will be many, many more.

So yeah, have a have a lovely happy holiday season to you and yours and 

Happy New Year and all that stuff too. Thank you for being here. Thank you everyone for joining. Merry 

Christmas. Thanks for sticking with us. Merry Christmas. 

Merry Christmas.