Very hard to quantify this. I personally believe many companies fail to find product market fit due to poor execution (bad code being a common culprit) but we don’t say they failed due to bad code. We say they failed to find product market fit.

More broadly there is this idea in tech startup internet bubble land that you just need a novel idea to get you to product market fit. In reality you need to execute. Starting a car company isn’t a bad idea simply because many competitors exist. But you better build great cars. If you don’t, you might be inclined to say “we couldn’t find product market fit”

Digg had some poor product decisions along with a buggy rewrite that coincided with Reddit's surge in popularity. These along with other factors contributed to its decline (though it still exists but one could deem it a business failure). But for poor code alone, hard to think of any notable cases.

Southwest Airlines, just this past winter. Multiple factors were involved, but chief among these appears to have been a series of deficiencies in its "outdated" scheduling system (which upper management was well aware of, but it didn't want to foot the bill for a proper fix).

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/27/1145616523/southwest-airlines...

And from the WSJ: https://archive.is/3ujIL

What about a lack of tests, or bad coding standards?

We don't know the particulars, but one can reasonably infer that the root causes were broader and more systemic than that (i.e. a mix of technical and organizational issues).

Knight Capital comes to mind.

Therac-25 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25).

It didn't actually kill the company, just the product line.

Ashton-Tate. They were one of the three largest software companies in the world (together with Microsoft and Lotus) in their time. Then they shipped Dbase IV v1.0, that was full of bugs. Instead of focusing on fixing them and shipping a v1.1, they focused on other products while their customers stopped buying v1.0 and waited for v1.1 with the expected bug fixes. They ended up selling themselves to Borland.

Fun fact: Ashton was actually George Tate's parrot, living in a large cage in the L.A. office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia

> Ma.gnolia servers lost all data in a complete outage on January 30, 2009.On February 17, Halff announced that due to data corruption, all user data in the database was irretrievable, rendering the site essentially dead.

I don't think bad code and failing to find product market for are mutually exclusive. A lack of tests, an inconsistent code base, or a shaky architecture can make it hard to make changes, which can freeze software in place. In a sector where product market fit is a moving target, a product that can't evolve is dead.

The successor game to Duke Nukem 3d sunk the company 3d Realms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever