In a year when the economy made things difficult for everybody, some companies compounded the situation with high-profile mistakes of their own. In fact, the toughest part about this category was narrowing down the list of nominees to something manageable. Today's Flashies category: Biggest Tech Debacle of the Year. And the nominees are ...

As with previous categories, free to offer a write-in candidate in the comments below. Other readers will be able to support your nomination by logging in and clicking the "like" button next your comment. We'll announce all the Flashies winners in a post at the end of the year.

If this is too much of a downer, stay tuned for an antidote: Tomorrow's Flashies category will look at better moments from the past year.

Continue reading for detailed descriptions of the nominees for today's category, and our reasons for including them. Check back throughout the week as we continue to roll out more Flashies categories.

Alaska Airlines retreats on free Wi-Fi at Sea-Tac: TechFlash readers were pretty pumped after an Alaska Airlines marketing executive announced at a conference in April that the Seattle airline planned to bring free Wi-Fi to Sea-Tac Airport. "Great marketing move," wrote reader Kevin Foreman. "Congrats to the Alaska Airlines team for changing the status quo." By the next day, however, Alaska Airlines was backpedaling from the statement, noting that the exec simply "misspoke." But Seattle travelers didn't have to wait long as Google announced seven months later that it planned a limited free Wi-Fi promotion at Sea-Tac.

Amazon.com's Orwellian deletion: In an incident rich with irony, Amazon.com came under sharp criticism for remotely deleting copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" from Kindle electronic book reader. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos later apologized, writing in a Kindle discussion board that the company was "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles." Amazon ended up settling a lawsuit that had been filed by a high-school student whose digital notes on "1984" were wiped out in the incident. The company has promised not to repeat the mistake.

AT&T's network performance: Just how frustrated are AT&T's customers with dropped calls, missing text messages and slow Internet connections? Give this a try: Go to Twitter and type in the word #att. There, you will find numerous complaints about the carrier's spotty network performance, including this recent Tweet: "#att you are the WORST carrier in history!!! #fail." Ouch. AT&T is trying to address the problems -- even going so far as to release an iPhone app earlier this month to allow customers to geographically tag network problems. But consumer complaints are mounting, and pressure is rising on Apple to take its popular iPhone to more U.S. wireless carriers.

Fisher Plaza data center fire: A small electrical fire caused big problems when one of Seattle's most important telecom hubs was knocked out of commission for much of the Fourth of July weekend. The late night fire on July 2 disrupted service for many high-profile Web sites -- from Allrecipes.com to Bing Travel to KOMO News. And the extended downtimes raised questions about back-up policies for some of the companies. The fire hurt the reputation of Fisher Communications -- which owns and manages the data center. Fisher recently disclosed that the fire could cost the company (and its insurance provider) upwards of $10 million in remediation and equipment replacement costs, and losses on fixed assets.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile woes: After focusing much of its early Windows Mobile efforts on business users, and corporate IT departments, Microsoft was late in recognizing the critical role that consumers would play in determining the direction of the market. The Redmond company's flat feet became more than apparent this year, as the iPhone took hold and Google Android emerged as a credible rival. Windows Mobile 6.5 debuted in October, but even Microsoft acknowledged that it needed to do better. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer brought even more attention to Windows Mobile's problems when he spotted an employee using an iPhone at the company's meeting, and pretended to stomp on it.

Sidekick data loss: Users of T-Mobile's Sidekick device found themselves without access to their contacts, photos and other personal data after a high-profile server failure at Microsoft subsidiary Danger, which provides the technology behind the Sidekick system. After a roller coaster ride for Sidekick users, the companies were able to restore the data, but not in time to prevent lawsuits tons of negative publicity at the hands of celebrity blogger Perez Hilton and many other frustrated Sidekick users.