In February 2024, a single press release crashed the stock of one of the world's largest call center operators to a seven-year low — without a single lawsuit, merger, or earnings miss. The headline claimed an AI had just eliminated 700 jobs overnight. Wall Street panicked. The media ran with it. Almost everyone got the story completely wrong. What Klarna actually did is far stranger — and far more instructive — than the ghost story that circulated in the press. The real sequence of events spans a valuation collapse of 85%, a secret architectural failure buried inside millions of customer conversations, and a CEO who eventually sat down on camera in 2025 and said words almost no tech founder utters during an AI hype cycle. The cost of getting this wrong wasn't theoretical. It showed up on a balance sheet. — Why did Klarna's customer service costs  ...