Geek Weekly: Our top weird tech stories for 30 April 2015

Technology Decisions’ weekly wrap of IT fails, latest tech, new must-have gadgets, ‘computer says no’ moments and more.

iPad glitch grounds flights. Several dozen American Airlines flights were grounded recently when the pilots’ iPads - which they use to display flight charts and other information - went completely blank. “The pilot came on and said that his first mate’s iPad powered down unexpectedly, and his had too, and that the entire 737 fleet on American had experienced the same behaviour,” Philip McRell, a passenger on flight #1654, was quoted on the Apple Insider website. “It seemed unprecedented and very unfamiliar to the pilots.”

You have (someone reading your) mail. It’s not only the Indonesian President’s wife who has to put up with someone checking on her private conversations. It seems that Russian hackers were reading some of Barack Obama’s emails last year, after breaching a White House computer system. Officials say the computers were not part of the highly classified systems, but that nevertheless correspondence between the President and other people was stolen.

Spitting the dummy via email. A university professor in the USA emailed all the students in his strategic management class, telling them he was failing them all due to what he described as backstabbing, cheating and a lack of maturity. He also said he wouldn’t continue teaching the class, having reached a ‘breaking point’.

Starbucks roasted over glitch. The sales systems at thousands of Starbucks stores across the USA and Canada went down last week following a ‘daily system refresh’ failure, according to the company. The coffee chain was forced to close stores for the day, but the system was back up the following day.

$52m jackpot evaporates. A US woman thought she’d hit the big time while playing a touchscreen gambling machine when she saw a message flash up telling her that she’d won a $52 million jackpot. But the casino thought otherwise, had the machine tested and found that the message had been erroneous. On top of which, the rules for that particular game stipulated a maximum US$10,000 payout. The case has been through the courts and the casino has come out the winner