What this is

They f'd up is a running record of Microsoft breaking its own stuff, making strange decisions, and taking away things people liked. Every entry is a real event with sources. The jokes are ours. The facts are not.

When the same bad idea comes back years later, the entries link to each other, because that's usually the best part of the story.

What counts

• Broke an update or patch malfunctioned and things stopped working. These pages also tell you how to undo the damage.
• Decided a business choice. A price hike, a forced account, an ad where there didn't used to be an ad.
• Killed a feature or product people liked, gone.

One event is one entry, no matter how many people it hit. Ten thousand forum posts about one broken printer is one broken printer.

How bad was it

Every entry gets a score in Vistas. One Vista is the damage from the launch of Windows Vista in 2007, the working unit of Microsoft disasters. A dead printer or a vanished app is a small fraction of a Vista. Deleting people's files is a full Vista. The classics go over: Windows Me, the release readers nicknamed the Mistake Edition, rates two and a half Vistas, a mass Exchange hack that ended with the FBI cleaning servers rates one and a half, and so does a console outage that refused to start your disc games. The scale is open at the top. Microsoft keeps testing it.

There is only one score. It gets a dot on the big chart over on the Leaderboard.

Can you trust it

Every entry carries one of these four tags. You will see the tag on every card and every entry page:

• officially acknowledged Microsoft admitted it happened.
• well documented multiple independent reports that agree.
• reported a couple of matching reports.
• unconfirmed one report. Treat with salt.

Sources

Every entry links to where the information came from, the article itself wherever possible. A few links still point to overview pages while we track down the originals. Links get checked automatically once a month, and fixes get double checked on a rolling basis.

If we get something wrong, the correction shows up on the entry itself and stays there. Deleting quiet edits is for companies we cover, not for us.

Who made this

Made by kitkarl — Karl's personal corner of the internet: a playground of experiments, tools and toy projects. This site is one of them. It got out of hand.