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We interrupt our holiday hiatus just to say hey, we miss you. We'll be back to our regular programming after the New Year. Till then, stay safe and enjoy yourselves. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

GOODBYE, 2021...

This is Patrick Stewart wearing a nightcap while sipping a nightcap, in Nightcap.

I'd say 2021 overall was a mixed bag.

On one hand, we got vaccines! The stock market continued to climb and the economy came roaring back to life. But also, we got a global supply chain crisis, stubborn inflation, questionable decisions in democracy, the Delta and Omicron variants, plus our continued collective dread that sets in just as our heads hit the pillow, summoning us from sleep to instead ponder the decisions that have led us here, the Sliding Doors-like alt-realities playing out in a parallel life in which you just went for that pixie cut and finished that play you started in college and traded your house for a van that would take you out west where it's warm, and oh no what about the wildfires, I guess there's risk anywhere you live, and oh my god is it really 3 a.m., and if I start watching TikToks again will that soothe me or just project more blue light into my brain, further suspending the release of melatonin that might lull me into a slumber before I shuffle back to my computer and begin this excruciating routine all over again…

Anyway, one of my favorite end-of-year activities is looking back on other people's mistakes to distract me from my own, and this year, Silicon Valley was a veritable cornucopia of noteworthy foibles.

Here are a few of CNN Business' top tech-tastrophes of 2021…

Two outages (briefly) take down much of the internet

It happened twice in less than two weeks: Swaths of the internet went down, felled by outages at tech companies that most people have never even heard of. The outages were quickly detected and short-lived, but they underscored how reliant we are on the internet, and how precarious it can be.

June 8: Countless websites including Reddit, CNN and Amazon went dark because of a glitch at content delivery network Fastly.
June 17: An issue at a similar company, Akamai Technologies, broke websites including those belonging to Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The Fastly outage was spotted within a minute and lasted less than an hour for most affected websites, while Akamai let customers know of the problem within seconds and was able to fix it within four hours (and the company said most affected customers were offline for just minutes).

Facebook's brutal week

The first week of October was not a fun one for Facebook.

First, whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed her identity on a "60 Minutes" segment, claiming the company knew how its social networks were used to spread misinformation, hate speech, and violence.
Then, a major outage shut down Facebook, WhatApp, and Instagram for hours, which it blamed on "configuration changes." Its stock plunged as the company contended with the dueling issues of an outage and blowback from Haugen's television appearance.
And then Haugen testified before members of Congress.
Oh, and the company also asked for the dismissal of an antitrust complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission.

Zillow vs. the Machine

In November, Zillow scrapped its home-flipping business, Zillow Offers, which it had once touted as the future of the company. The reason? "Unpredictability in forecasting home prices" that "far exceeds" what the company had expected. In other words, Zillow bet the farm on artificial intelligence that wasn't attuned to the nuances of the housing market.

Tesla's "full self-driving" freaks out drivers (including CNN)

Tesla's "full self-driving" is a comical misnomer. It's nowhere near fully autonomous — in fact, users have to agree that they must remain alert at the steering wheel in case they need to take over. The handful of drivers who've tested it, including some at CNN Business, say that while there's some impressive tech behind the system, the overall result is, well, frankly terrifying.

My colleague Rachel Metz has the full fail list here.

RECKONING ON WALL STREET

Continuing in the spirit of reflection…Remember GameStop?

It's hard to believe it's been almost a full year since the Reddit army of day traders took on Wall Street.

The GameStop saga, brief though it was, marked a turning point for Wall Street. Did the so-called Apes overthrow the establishment? No, far from it. But the spectacle of the uprising was every bit as important as the result. Once GameStop caught the public's imagination, Wall Street could no longer afford to dismiss social media or the investors who congregate on it.

"Most people saw it as this revolution," says Spencer Jakab, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author of a forthcoming book about the GameStop rally. "And a lot of young people are still convinced that they're fighting some kind of virtuous fight against evil hedge funds... but, basically, the story is the same: If you think you've figured something out to beat Wall Street, you probably haven't."

The Reddit army's moment fizzled in early February when GameStop cratered to around $45. Those who joined late, buying the stock at its peak of around $480, were left with huge losses. These days, GME trades around $145 — up nearly 700% for the year, but far from January's highs.

Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of WallStreetBets, acknowledges that what happened with GameStop wasn't a revolution per se, but that doesn't mean the community or the ethos that guided it — sniffing out market inefficiencies and exploiting them for profit — is dead.

"They're little accounts, but they've now figured out how to push a stock price, even with their insignificant size," Rogozinski told me, "They're not going to stop looking for these things."

So who won, David or Goliath? Maybe both.

The force of the January squeeze was powerful enough to make even the stodgiest of Wall Street elite sit up and take notice. US regulators are paying close attention, too.

"You'll be hard-pressed to find a company that has over 100% short float now, right?" Rogozinski says. In other words, no Wall Street firm with any sense wants to end up like Melvin Capital, a titan that was squeezed so hard by the GameStop surge it lost 53% of its fund in under a month. If you massively short a stock and run up your exposure, you're putting a target on your back.

WallStreetBets, with all its crude jargon and machismo, became a check on institutional investors who had perhaps gotten too cozy. Not wanting to be wrong twice, firms have hired social media managers and subscribed to services that monitor social chatter

For better or worse, Jakab says, all of this has made Wall Street even better at making money.

"I think what's changed is that Wall Street is totally aware of what's going on," says Jakab. "And they are not going to get caught out in the same way again. They monitor social media, they're going to be more judicious about getting exposed."

For all the so-called Apes accomplished, Jakab argues, in the end it was the little guy that got hosed in the GameStop saga. His book, "The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors," Jakab makes the case that despite all the talk of sticking it to the Man, the rally only tipped the odds further in Wall Street's favor.

"Wall Street likes this," he told me. "Wall Street likes millions of young people who hate Wall Street putting their money on Wall Street — they don't care if they're hated."