Incident 379: Error in Pepsi's Number Generation System Led to Decades-Long Damages in the Philippines

Description: Pepsi's number generation system determining daily winners in its Number Fever promotion in the Philippines mistakenly produced a number held by thousands which resulted in riots, deaths, conspiracy theories, and decades of lawsuits.

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Alleged: D.G. Consultores developed an AI system deployed by Pepsi, which harmed Filipinos.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

379

Report Count

Incident Date

1992-05-25

Editors

Khoa Lam

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

The Computer Error That Led to a Country Declaring War on Pepsi

mentalfloss.com

Pepsi-Cola's Number Fever Fiasco: How the Media Portrays the Actors of a Crisis

docs.rwu.edu

mentalfloss.com · 2018

On May 25, 1992, the Channel 2 News program in Manila, Philippines aired a segment that had been running since February of that year. Each night, the station alerted viewers to the day’s winning number in Pepsi’s Number Fever promotion. Buy…

docs.rwu.edu · 2021

In 1992, Pepsi created a marketing ploy to increase interest in its products in the Philippines. The game was aptly called “Number Fever,” and participants had to look at the number printed underneath the cap of their soft drink bottle and …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.