Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern US last week, damaging property, killing hundreds, and leaving many without power. Asheville, North Carolina, was particularly hard hit by the storm. The data center hosting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) climate data in Asheville is still offline.
Hurricane Helene”s severe flooding knocked offline the top tracker of U.S. and global climate data, including of extreme weather.https://t.co/YVDsdvMiyF
— Axios (@axios) September 30, 2024
Unfortunately, Helene wasn’t the source of numerous tech outages throughout the week. Spotify experienced a brief three hour outage on Sunday, keeping up to 40,000 users from their music. On Monday, Verizon experienced a massive network outage that impacted mobile users across the US for most of the business day. Some mobile phones were unusable except for emergency calls. AT&T and T-Mobile users also reported having trouble connecting, but AT&T believes that may be because they were trying to communicate with people on the Verizon network. The company has yet to explain what caused the outage. The Federal Communications Commission is said to be investigating the incident.
Later that day, the PlayStation Network experienced a global outage, preventing users from accessing their accounts on most game consoles, including the PS5, PS4, PS Vita, and PS3. The network was unavailable for approximately nine hours, starting at 8PM Eastern time. Sony has yet to explain what caused the outage, and their service status page says everything is operational. A day later, Xbox Live experienced a similar outage that prevented users from logging in to profiles, which is necessary to play most cloud games. This issue was resolved without explanation from Microsoft.
As if that wasn’t enough chaos for one week, many Bank of America customers discovered their account balances were not what they expected on Wednesday. Users who could access mobile or internet banking reported seeing balances of $0, while others just received error messages that their accounts or balances were temporarily unavailable. Like the other outages, the issue was resolved without explanation from Bank of America.
Why it matters:
So much of our everyday lives depend on data stored elsewhere. We take it for granted that our communications, finances, and entertainment will always be available. Occasional outages are to be expected, but multiple in the same week? And from public companies? Individuals don’t have much recourse when these outages occur. It’s not like we have a landline to rely on, cash stuffed under our mattresses, or a deck of playing cards handy. The US government needs to follow the path of the EU and enact regulations to ensure that critical infrastructure remains resilient, like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Companies must also take more precautions to stay online, as their outages aren’t impacting a few people – they’re impacting thousands at a time. Finally, these companies should invest in PR training – as remaining silent during a crisis is a horrible customer experience.
Music is licensed to ensure that artists receive royalties for their work. This doesn’t usually impact consumers, but broadcasters cannot play unlicensed music without incurring penalties or fees. That’s why songs from Adele, Bob Dylan, Nirvana, REM, and Kanye West were blocked from US viewers on YouTube earlier this week. YouTube’s agreement with the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC), representing 30,000 members, was set to expire on October 1, 2024, but the two organizations had not agreed on a new deal. YouTube removed the songs before the deadline and showed US users who tried to access them a message that the video was unavailable in their region. YouTube restored the blocked videos after reaching a deal with SESAC.
Why it Matters:
This isn’t the first time a licensing agreement has prevented content from being available on a large-scale platform. Cable networks experience this all the time—just this summer, a licensing fiasco between Diamond Sports Group and Comcast prevented local fans of the Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins, St. Louis Cardinals, and many other baseball teams from watching the games. But as the internet makes the world smaller, local laws one might never think about suddenly become relevant. In this case, the licensing agreement was quickly handled, so you can pop open YouTube and listen to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” the next time an outage tells you that your bank balance is $0.
Google’s experimental AI writing assistant NotebookLM is taking the internet by storm as users discover you can use it to turn any document into a podcast. The tool helps researchers quickly make sense of their data by synthesizing the sources a user uploads. The tool can create a table of contents, FAQ, or study guide with the click of a button. Users can also use natural language to ask questions about their uploaded documents, and the tool will provide citations. The model only uses the information provided, so the risk of hallucination is much lower. But a feature in the latest release has brought the tool to the forefront: Audio Overviews. Two AI “hosts” discuss your material, which you can listen to, download, or share.
Why it Matters:
The internet is already overflowing with AI-generated content. Experts predict that AI will have created 90% of online content by 2026. Doctored images, deepfakes, and voice imposters are already everywhere, and they’re getting harder to detect. It’s much more difficult to fact-check a podcast you’re listening to on the go than an online article. Humans also suffer from a few cognitive biases that make it easier for them to fall for disinformation. We tend to remember and believe the first thing we hear due to primacy and anchoring biases. The authority bias leads us to believe that “experts” have more knowledge about subjects than we do, even when those “experts” are AI-generated podcast hosts.
Other things to be aware of:
And, in case you missed it, a baby pygmy hippo named Moo Deng has gone viral. You can now view her 24/7 live stream on Zoodio.
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