Oops! The Top 10 Business Blunders of 2011

From public relations disasters to poor company management, 2011 has had its fair share of business blunders.

However, certain blunders stand out from the crowd. Whether it involves embarrasing tweets, tone-deaf CEOs or even the disappearance of money, some oops moments need be relived just one more time.

Therefore, here are the top 10 Biggest Business Oops of 2011.

10. YahOOPS! Occupy Wall Street Emails Censored?

Yahoo kicks off the list with its email system blunder this September, when messages being sent by users containing the web address occupywallstreet.org were returned, unsent, with error messages, raising questions about whether the service was censoring emails related to the growing movement.

Your message was not sent. Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent. If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help. We apologize for the inconvenience, the autoreply email read.

Yahoo apologized later, explaining that it was a technical mistake with its email filtering system, but the apology failed to undo suspicion over its motives.

9. Fiesta Bowl CEO Hits the Strip Club and Charges the Company

While most companies tightened their belts when the economy went south, former Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker decided to loosen his.

An internal investigation by the college bowl found that, among other things, Junker had previously spent the non-profit organization's money on improper campaign contributions (a violation of tax-exempt status) and iPads for employees.

The CEO's biggest oops was charging $1,241.75 on the organizations credit card at Bourbon Street in Phoenix, which prides itself as a World Famous Strip Club.

Not helping Junker's case was his excuse for attending the club with other employees.

We are in the business where big strong athletes are known to attend these types of establishments, he told investigators. It was important for us to visit and we certainly conducted business.

The board of directors didn't buy that explanation, and Junker was removed from his position.

8. Chrysler Drops the F-Bomb

Publicly swearing at hometown drivers isn't the best way to rebuild a company's image following a high-profile bankruptcy.

But a post on the Chrysler's Twitter page in March read, I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f----g drive. While we've spared you the full effect of the expletive, the original Tweet used the F-Bomb without any dashes.

Chrysler apologized for the oops and said the comment was placed by someone at New Media Strategies, which handles public relations for the automaker.

Chrysler also said it wouldn't renew its contract with the PR firm.

7. Kenneth Cole's Arab Spring Gaffe

Fashion designer Kenneth Cole's move to use the very serious and growing Arab Spring movement as an opportunity to plug his new spring collection on Twitter may well have been the biggest fashion faux pas of 2011.

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo, his tweet read.

Those few words drew widespread criticism, went viral as twitter missteps often do, and prompted a series of spoof tweets and boycotts.

For his oops, the designer apologized later in the day on Facebook, but the damage was already done.

6. BlackBerry Restores Service...Or Does It?

Like George W. Bush declaring the end of military operations in Iraq under a Mission Accomplished banner, Research in Motion had its Bush-like oops when company officials proclaimed to have restored service to BlackBerry customers during the October service outage.

Service wasn't restored for another two days, drawing ire from millions of its customers.

Like Yahoo, BlackBerry's oops was just one blip in a year fraught with problems. RIM stocks have tanked nearly 80 percent in 2011, and the fourth quarter forecast for the company is looking grim.

As the smartphone market grows increasingly competitive, RIM needs to do something big in order to accomplish their mission of creating a credible business and undo the damage from this incident.

5. S&P Accidentally Downgrades France

While technology isn't perfect, rarely can pesky tech glitches threaten to shake the global economy.

But an announcement sent out accidentally by Standard & Poor's that downgraded France's credit rating did just that. Although S&P called the oops a technical error, French official's weren't so forgiving.

This error is inexcusable and clearly raises the question of having much more regulation of ratings agencies, French budget minister Valerie Pecresse told French TV.

France's rating eventually could get cut, but would S&P become the boy who cried wolf? Afterall, this is the same agency that gave AAA ratings to risky mortgages before the financial crisis and committed a $2 trillion accounting error before deciding to downgrade America's credit rating.

4. Hewlett Packard Has CEO Problems... Again

After former Hewlett Packard head Mark Hurd was fired for repeatedly visiing actress Jodie Fisher on the company's dime, you'd think HP would have found a CEO less prone to controversy, right?

Wrong. The board hired Leo Apotheker in 2010 after he was recently terminated from German software company SAP. Things went downhill for HP quickly. Stock prices fell 40 percent during his tenure, including 25 percent on Aug. 19 when HP announced it was discontinuing its webOS device business and considering spinning off its PC division.

After 10 months, the board said auf widersehen to Apotheker, though it did punish him with a $14 million severance package.

3. Bank of America Institutes Fee to Use Your Own Money

Despite the heightened media attention on Occupy Wall Street and scrutiny over banking practices, Bank of America still thought it was a good time to roll out a $5 monthly debit card fee.

Oops. Bank of America received backlash as customers cried foul and Occupy protesters pounced on the move. People took to social media to air grievances. Credit unions enticed people to move their money out of institutions such as Bank of America and into their non-profit unions.

After about a month, Bank of America retreated. In fairness, other banks tried to implement a debit fee too, but they backed out of those plans more promptly, leaving Bank of America looking like the buffoon and taking the brunt of that boo-boo.

2. Netflix Tries to Split Company, But Splits with Customers Instead

Netflix committed what could be one of the biggest and most self-destructive blunders of the year when the company in September decided to split its streaming service and DVD-by mail service and imposed a 60 percent price hike for customers.

Netflix subscribers reacted almost immediately, bailing in hundreds of thousands and forcing the company to rewind its decision on the split the very next month (but keeping the price hike) and prompting CEO Reed Hastings to say we screwed up.

If making understatements were an Olympic sport, Hastings would have won the gold medal. The stock price is now worth about one-quarter of its peak before the Qwikster fiasco, and Netflix buyout rumors are circulating.

1. MF Global to Customers: Sorry We Lost Your Money

Taking the grand prize for the biggest business oops this year is financial derivatives firm MF Global, which saw the disappearance of $1.2 billion dollars in customers' money from its coffers.

I simply do not know where the money is, said Jon Corzine, MF Global's former CEO who resigned Nov. 3, in his testimony to Congress following the company's collapse Oct. 31. MF Global and Corzine are now being investigated by the Feds.

So where's the money, and how is it that Corzine, who is also a former Goldman Sachs CEO, United States senator and New Jersey governor, not know where it went?

The federal probe may soon yield answers to this billion-dollar question, but that won't be enough to undo what could well be the biggest and most expensive company misstep this year, placing both Corzine and MF Global at the top of the list for The Biggest Oops of 2011.