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When Gmail is slow, Amazon trips, when there is a Facebook issue, or Foursquare's API crashes, people get upset, and tens of thousands reveal their anxiety on social networks.

Failure. All startups fear it. Many, at one point or another, encounter it. There's no denying that failure is a big part of startup culture. Some of the best and brightest preach the "fail fast" methodology, wherein quickly launching and fixing small failures can help avoid "the big one."

Whether you subscribe to this practice or not, the reality is that startups fail all the time, and luckily many entrepreneurs share their experiences "post-mortem" with the community. We've covered a handful of these posts from startups, but now ChubbyBrain has put together a hefty collection of these essays for your education.

When startups fail and are forced to shut down, often times one of the co-founders will offer a short blog post about what happened and why the company wasn't able to succeed. Not everyone does however, as reveling in your own failure isn't the most fun thing to do. In the case of the failed individual journalism platform NewsTilt, co-founder Paul Biggar penned a 7,000 word essay last week that painstakingly details how and why his company ultimately failed, providing a must-read set of lessons for any entrepreneur.

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

The online world is an imperfect place. Gmail goes down, chunks of blog posts disappear, and users are deceived on a regular basis. Most of us who spend time online are aware of - and have come to expect - these foibles and hiccups. But now, throngs of mainstream media outlets are entering the fray with a bit of naivete, rushing to use online services that may not yet be ready for prime time - literally. ABC News learned their lesson the hard way during US President Obama's address to Congress.

Only last week, the Mozilla Project proudly announced a "milestone release" of Fennec, the web browser also known as "Firefox Mobile." The much anticipated software was made available for download in a pre-alpha version for the HTC Touch Pro, a Windows Mobile smartphone. Shortly after its debut, mobile web enthusiasts everywhere began testing the new browser. But then something strange occurred. Instead of surfing the web, testers were stuck staring at a black-and-white checkerboard screen. It appeared that Fennec, right out of the gate, was completely broken.