Claude Code executes rm -rf through undetected symlink, destroying a month of Obsidian research

McDonald's AI-powered drive-thru ordering system, developed in a joint venture with IBM, failed repeatedly across more than 100 test locations, generating incorrect and excessive orders that enraged customers. In documented incidents, the voice AI misinterpreted customer requests and autonomously added large quantities of items never requested, including over $250 worth of chicken McNuggets and unwanted packs of butter charged to individual customers. Rather than escalating ambiguous or unlikely orders to a human worker, the system processed them as-is. Customers filmed their interactions and posted the footage to social media, turning the failures into a public relations liability. Faced with sustained evidence that the technology could not reliably replace human order-takers, McDonald's announced it was terminating the IBM partnership and removing the AI system from all test restaurants. McDonald's USA chief restaurant officer Mason Smoot acknowledged the discontinuation in a statement but indicated the chain would continue exploring voice ordering solutions more broadly. The rollback ended a pilot that had expanded to over 100 locations.

A backend session bug at Cursor IDE began silently logging users out whenever they switched between devices — no warning, no notification. Users contacted Cursor support seeking an explanation. Cursor's AI support system, described as designed to 'mimic human responses,' was the first point of contact. Rather than acknowledging ignorance or escalating, the bot fabricated an authoritative-sounding answer: it told multiple users the forced logouts were 'expected behavior' under a new single-device login restriction policy. No such policy existed. Because the bot presented itself as a human support agent, users had no reason to doubt the response. The hallucinated policy explanation spread rapidly across the developer community — multi-device workflows being non-negotiable for most developers, the fabricated policy was treated as a serious product decision made without any changelog entry or user notice. Within hours, dozens of users publicly canceled their subscriptions. As users began cross-referencing the story and noticing inconsistencies, the primary Reddit thread discussing the incident was locked and then deleted by moderators, with no public resolution or official acknowledgment. The underlying cause turned out to be a backend session bug — not a policy — but by the time that became clear, the cancellations had already happened. The hallucinated support response caused substantially more reputational and subscription damage than the original bug ever could have on its own.