Failure intelligence, not failure trivia
F Failurepedia

Failure intelligence, not failure trivia

What went wrong, why it happened, and what can be learned.

Failurepedia turns company, product, and institutional failures into structured, source-backed case studies with timelines, causal chains, and practical lessons.

Explore 357 cases Read methodology

Featured Failure

DeLorean Motor Company

The DeLorean Motor Company built one car, the stainless-steel, gull-winged DMC-12, in a British-government-funded factory in Belfast. It was expensive (around $25,000, more than twice the average car), underpowered, and plagued by unreliable electronics, and it launched straight into the 1980-82 recession. Too few people bought it; by the end of 1981 only 3,000 had sold. The company went into receivership in February 1982, and the arrest of founder John DeLorean that October, on charges he was later acquitted of, finished off a firm that was already collapsing.

Bankruptcy Execution
Ended
1982
Raised
Not recorded
Layer
Execution
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Failure Patterns

Recurring root causes

Unsustainable economics 77 cases

Unsustainable economics

e.g. Air Berlin: Air Berlin grew into Germany's second-largest airline through debt-funded acquisitions, but never made money and was kept aloft by Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways. Etihad's hub-feed strategy distracted it from low-cost competition, and when Etihad stopped writing cheques in August 2017 the airline collapsed within weeks.
Stronger competitor 76 cases

Stronger competitor

e.g. Ansett Australia: One of Australia's two great airlines flew an ageing, under-invested fleet that was grounded over safety while low-cost newcomers and Qantas undercut it. Losing about A$1.3 million a day, it was cut loose by its owner after 9/11 and collapsed in 2001.
Poor execution 76 cases

Poor execution

e.g. Apple AirPower: Apple announced a charge-anywhere wireless mat, hit engineering walls it could not clear, and cancelled it without ever shipping, its first such reversal.
No real demand 66 cases

No real demand

e.g. McDonald's Arch Deluxe: McDonald's spent a reported $300 million to sell adults a "grown-up" burger. It learned that customers came to McDonald's for exactly what it already was, not an upscale sandwich priced above the Big Mac.
Failure to adapt 58 cases

Failure to adapt

e.g. Alcatel-Lucent: The 2006 "merger of equals" between France's Alcatel and America's Lucent was meant to create a telecom-equipment champion. Instead it produced a decade of losses, culture clashes, and endless restructuring, before Nokia absorbed what was left in 2016.
Strategic drift 54 cases

Strategic drift

e.g. Blockbuster: The video-rental giant that passed on Netflix, leaned on late fees, and abandoned its own online strategy before streaming buried it.

Explore by Domain

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Company shutdown 2000

3dfx

3dfx made the Voodoo cards that gave 1990s PC gaming its first real 3D graphics, and for a moment it owned the category. Then it made a fatal move. It bought its own card manufacturer and cut out the partners who sold its chips, pushing them straight to Nvidia. Product delays and huge losses followed, and in December 2000 a beaten 3dfx sold its assets to Nvidia and dissolved.
Bankruptcy 2012

A123 Systems

A123 Systems was an MIT-born battery maker that looked like the future of American electric vehicles, raising $371 million in the biggest green-tech IPO of 2009 and a $249 million federal grant. But the EV market did not scale as hoped, it leaned on a few shaky customers, and a costly recall of faulty batteries in Fisker's Karma drained it. A123 went bankrupt in 2012 and its assets were bought by a Chinese conglomerate.
Company shutdown 2018

Airware

Airware raised $118 million from Silicon Valley's best investors to become the operating system of commercial drones. But it could not win in hardware against China's DJI, and its late pivot to enterprise drone-data software could not sell fast enough to pay the bills. After 18 months hunting for cash, it ran out in 2018 and shut down overnight.
Failed acquisition 2016

Alcatel-Lucent

The 2006 "merger of equals" between France's Alcatel and America's Lucent was meant to create a telecom-equipment champion. Instead it produced a decade of losses, culture clashes, and endless restructuring, before Nokia absorbed what was left in 2016.
Failed strategy 2013

AltaVista

Before Google, AltaVista was how you searched the web. Built in 1995 to show off Digital Equipment Corporation's fast Alpha chip, it was the first search engine that could index and search the whole internet quickly, and by the late 1990s it was one of the most visited sites online. Then it lost the plot. As Google won on focused, relevance-ranked search, AltaVista turned itself into a cluttered Yahoo-style portal and was passed from owner to owner. Google overtook it by around 2001, and Yahoo quietly switched it off in 2013.
Failed launch 2015

Amazon Fire Phone

Amazon's premium-priced smartphone launched into a mature two-OS market with no compelling advantage, and was written off within months.
Market withdrawal 2015

Amazon Local

Amazon Local (originally AmazonLocal) was Amazon's 2011 entry into the daily-deals boom, offering discounted vouchers for local businesses in competition with Groupon and LivingSocial. It launched with a LivingSocial supply partnership and reached roughly 40 US markets, but never became a category leader. Amazon quietly wound the service down in late 2015, closing it alongside its Local Register card-reader business as the entire daily-deals model collapsed industry-wide.
Market withdrawal 2019

Amazon Restaurants

Amazon Restaurants was Amazon's four-year attempt to win food delivery. Launched in Seattle in 2015 through Prime Now, it offered free delivery for Prime members and no menu markups, and it still could not gain a foothold against Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Deliveroo. Amazon closed the UK service in 2018 and shut the US business in June 2019, then did the telling thing. Instead of competing, it put $575 million into its rival Deliveroo.
Product discontinuation 2019

Amazon Spark

Amazon Spark was Amazon's Instagram, a shoppable photo feed for Prime members where you posted products you loved and others tapped "smiles" instead of likes. The problem was in the premise. It was built around buying, not around people, so it felt transactional and bland, and it lacked the reasons anyone opens Instagram. About 10,000 Amazon customers used it on day one. Two years later, in 2019, Amazon quietly shut it down.
Failed launch 2019

Apple AirPower

Apple announced a charge-anywhere wireless mat, hit engineering walls it could not clear, and cancelled it without ever shipping, its first such reversal.
Product discontinuation 1985

Apple Lisa

The Apple Lisa, launched in January 1983, was the first personal computer most people could buy with a graphical interface and a mouse, ideas Apple had seen at Xerox PARC. It was also a commercial flop. At $9,995, roughly $25,000 in today's money, it was far too expensive for the business buyers it targeted, and within a year Apple's own cheaper Macintosh delivered the same ideas at a quarter of the price and eclipsed it. Apple discontinued the Lisa in 1985 and later buried thousands of unsold units in a landfill.
Failed launch 2012

Apple Maps (2012 launch)

In September 2012 Apple dropped Google Maps as the iPhone default and shipped its own Maps in iOS 6. It was a disaster of wrong locations, roads that did not exist, melted 3D bridges, and no transit directions. Within a week Tim Cook issued Apple's first public product apology and told customers to use rivals instead. The debacle cost software chief Scott Forstall his job. The product eventually recovered, but the launch remains one of tech's most famous failures.
View all 114 Technology cases

By The Numbers

Archive statistics

Start with the patterns we can compare across every case: timing and how each story ended. Money is harder to pin down, so disclosed losses and funding appear as leaderboards instead of archive-wide totals.

Coverage, stated up front: all 357 cases are timed from start to end and classified by how the end arrived, so those two views cover the full archive. A published loss estimate exists for 52 cases (15%), and a disclosed funding total for 53 (15%). Those two views rank what has been sourced, not the archive as a whole. Figures appear in their original currency, not converted, and are not adjusted for inflation.

Time · Shortest run

Fastest to fail

Shortest to longest, by how long each one lasted before it ended. Covers 331 of 357 cases.

    01 DART (2005 autonomous rendezvous demonstration) technology · ended 2005 0 mo 02 CNN+ media · ended 2022 1 mo 02 European Super League media · ended 2021 1 mo 02 Lewis spacecraft technology · ended 1997 1 mo 05 HP TouchPad technology · ended 2011 2 mo 05 Microsoft Kin technology · ended 2010 2 mo

Time · Longest run

Slowest to fall

The same ranking, from the other end. Shown in years instead of months.

Encyclopaedia Britannica media 244 yr
Debenhams corporate 243 yr
Thomas Cook transportation 178 yr
House of Fraser corporate 169 yr
Lehman Brothers finance 158 yr
A&P (Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) corporate 156 yr

Money · Losses on record

Biggest disclosed losses

Only 52 of 357 cases have a published loss estimate, almost always a rough one. Each figure is shown in its original currency. Do not add these together, they are not on the same scale.

    01 Tongyang Group finance · ended 2014 ₩2T 02 Air India transportation · ended 2022 ₹708.2B 03 AOL–Time Warner media · ended 2009 $99B 04 RBS and the ABN AMRO Acquisition finance · ended 2008 £24.1B 05 Sogo consumer product · ended 2000 $17.3B 06 2013 Singapore Penny Stock Crash finance · ended 2013 SGD 8B

Money · Funding on record

Raised big, still failed

53 of 357 cases disclose how much money they raised before failing. All 6 shown here raised in USD, so the bars compare directly.

Magic Leap technology $2.6B
Quibi media $1.75B
Jawbone startup $900M
Better Place startup $850M
Webvan startup $800M
A123 Systems technology $371M

Pattern · How it ended

How the ending arrived

Every case is classified as a sudden, rapid, or gradual collapse. Covers all 357.

9%
36%
54%
Sudden 33 cases Rapid 130 cases Gradual 194 cases