The 17 biggest tech scandals of 2017

Travis Kalanick 2017 has been a reckoning of sorts.

Years of sexual misconduct in the tech industry (and elsewhere) were brought to light this year.

Tech giants like Facebook and Google had to answer questions about their roles in swaying the 2016 election.

Apple finally owned up to intentionally slowing down old iPhones.

Even YouTube star PewDiePie had a fall from grace, losing out on a lucrative deal with Disney for making anti-Semitic comments.

In short, it's been quite a year in tech.

What follows are the biggest scandals in the tech industry over the course of the last year. Grab some popcorn:

January: Uber's very bad year kicks off with #DeleteUber.

It's been an extraordinarily rocky year for Uber. Its bad luck began in January when the #DeleteUber movement led to a flurry of account deletions by customers upset about the company's ties to President Trump. It lost more than 200,000 customers in just one weekend.

As the year progressed, CEO Travis Kalanick resigned amid an investor revolt, many of Uber's other top executives resigned or were forced out, shady business practices were revealed, and more than 20 employees were fired as a result of an investigation into bad behavior in the workplace that includes sexual harassment.

(Plus, there was the Susan Fowler letter, the Waymo lawsuit, and the data breach, all of which deserve their own separate slides — more on those scandals to come.)

By December, Japanese investment firm SoftBank announced it had bought up around 15% of Uber at a 30% discount. SoftBank offered $33 per Uber share, which puts the company's value at $48 billion, a significant decrease from the $69 billion valuation it had after its last funding round.

Uber has said it still plans to go public by 2019.

February: Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler alleges sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company.

In February, a former Uber employee named Susan Fowler said in a personal blog post that she was sexually harassed and experienced gender bias during her year at the company.

The allegations were made in a post Fowler titled "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber," which detailed how she was propositioned for sex by her manager, was ignored and lied to by HR, and was excluded based on her gender.

CEO Travis Kalanick immediately launched an internal investigation into sexual harassment and gender discrimination at Uber, which eventually led to his own resignation.

Meanwhile, Fowler has a movie deal, and is expected to have a book deal soon.

February: Disney drops YouTube star PewDiePie after he posted videos containing anti-Semitic messages.

In February, Disney dropped YouTube star PewDiePie after he posted a series of videos that featured anti-Semitic messages.

PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is known for making gaming videos that often contain expletives and other colorful language. While a review by the Wall Street Journal found several videos containing anti-Semitic jokes, it was a video from January 11 that likely cost Kjellberg his deal with Disney. In the video, Kjellberg hired two men to make a sign that read "Death to All Jews" using the freelancer website Fiverr, where you can pay someone $5 to do something for you. Kjellberg later said the video was a joke that had gone too far.

Soon after, YouTube killed the second season of "Scare PewDiePie," and removed Kjellberg from its preferred advertising program.

Then, in September, Kjellberg used a racial epithet in an expletive-laden outburst during one of his popular live streams. He later apologized, saying, "I'm really sorry if I offended, hurt, or disappointed anyone with all of this."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider