The technology industry saw multiple outages last week. Apple, Facebook, and Google all suffered from seemingly unrelated issues bringing services down. Facebook experienced their biggest outage in years. The combination of these events highlight that the internet and online services are still fragile.
Apple suffered additional bad news with a ruling that the company infringed on Qualcomm’s intellectual property and will owe Qualcomm $31M.
On the topic of owing money… the EU is looking to shove their hands in Google’s pockets one more time.
Acquisitions
- Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox, Its Biggest Deal Ever at Roughly $7 Billion
With Mellanox, Nvidia is buying a maker of Ethernet switches and adapters that connect computers to each other, wiring together networks where users can rapidly exchange information. The company is a major supplier of equipment that conforms to the so-called InfiniBand networking standard widely used in supercomputers.
- Apple Acquires Machine Learning Startup in Boost for AI Group
Laserlike was active for four years and concentrated on an “interest search engine” that could fetch news, video, and general Web content relative to each user. A key assumption was that people may want to know about things that don’t necessarily pop up in their usual sources, such as a car recall or an upcoming music festival. The app for the engine is no longer available.
The Laserlike crew has reportedly joined Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google in 2018. His unit oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri.
Artificial Intelligence
- DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence
Google’s financial heft was attractive, yet, like many founders, Hassabis was reluctant to hand over the company he had nurtured. As part of the deal, DeepMind created an arrangement that would prevent Google from unilaterally taking control of the company’s intellectual property. In the year leading up to acquisition, according to a person familiar with the transaction, both parties signed a contract called the Ethics and Safety Review Agreement. The agreement, previously unreported, was drawn up by senior barristers in London.
The Review Agreement puts control of DeepMind’s core AGI technology, whenever it may be created, in the hands of a governing panel known as the Ethics Board. Far from being a cosmetic concession from Google, the Ethics Board gives DeepMind solid legal backing to keep control of its most valuable and potentially most dangerous technology, according to the same source.
Cloud
- Oracle’s Revenue Declines as It Struggles to Catch Up in Cloud Services
Oracle has been slower than some of its rivals to develop cloud-computing technology—services customers rent on demand over the web. That has put competitors in a better position to win business as customers shift away from managing their own computing operations.
The company expects to post revenue that is flat to down 2% in the current quarter, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz said during a conference call with analysts. Oracle shares, which fell a penny to $53.05 during regular trading Thursday, slid 3.9% after hours.
Brad Reback, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said the current spending environment for information technology is the most robust in two decades. “The world is passing Oracle by,” he said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-revenue-declines-1-11552595788
Software/SaaS
- Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are still down for some users around the world
According to DownDetector, it looks like the outages are mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Users have written in from Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey to note outages there as well. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Instagram to learn more.
Also
It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally gave the all clear, attributing the downtime to a “server configuration change.” “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience,” the company said via Twitter.
- Apple’s iCloud recovers after a four-hour outage
The company’s system status dashboard was blanketed in yellow warning notes for more than four hours Thursday, indicating mass outages of its iCloud service.
The page didn’t offer much in terms of detail as to why the services experienced problems, only saying that “some users are affected” and “users may be unable to access this service.” Apple didn’t say what caused the outage once iCloud recovered.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/apples-icloud-is-having-an-outage-too/
- And Google had an outage too…
At Google, some services, including Gmail, were slowed or outright inaccessible from Tuesday evening into early Wednesday on the East Coast. Google blamed a “cascading failure” that began after its engineers made tweaks to an internal storage service.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-instagram-suffer-lengthy-outages-11552539752
- After the “adult content” ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised
Tumblr’s global traffic in December clocked in at 521 million, but it had dropped to 370 million by February, web analytics firm SimilarWeb tells The Verge. Statista reports a similar trend in the number of unique visitors. By January 2019, only over 437 million visited Tumblr, compared to a high of 642 million visitors in July 2018.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-lost-users-down-traffic
This is an example of a company putting a goal or objective over profit. They had to know that was going to happen. - Apple Music launches on Amazon Fire TV
This change of pace from Apple’s standard walled-garden approach to services was most prevalent at CES 2019 where Apple said that iTunes will soon be available on Samsung smart TVs. In what was eventually dubbed a bug, Apple Music also appeared briefly on Google Home units but was never active before it was pulled offline.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/apple-music-for-amazon-fire-tv.html
Other
- A Better Way to Break Up Big Tech
The problem with applying a one-size-fits-four model to tech, as the industry analyst Ben Thompson has written, is that the large tech companies have different business models that pose different anti-competitive risks. The stranglehold that Google and Facebook have on the digital advertising market is different from the way Amazon muscles out e-commerce brands, which is different from the way Apple uses its App Store to force burdensome terms on developers.
The possibility of unintended consequences means that tailoring regulations to address each of these problems is important. A law that banned Amazon from competing with third-party sellers on its platform could also cripple Chromebook laptops, or prevent iPhone users from getting access to their iTunes libraries.
Rather than one giant package that crams everything together, a set of effective tech regulations would treat each problem discretely, and address each with surgical precision.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/elizabeth-warren-tech-companies.html
- Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation
It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department’s securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump’s election campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/facebook-data-deals-investigation.html
- Apple dealt legal blow as jury awards Qualcomm $31 million
The $31 million in damages — or $1.41 per infringing iPhone — is a drop in the bucket for Apple, a company that briefly became a $1 trillion company last year. But it marks an important victory for Qualcomm, burnishing its reputation as a mobile components innovator. The win also lends credibility to the notion that much of the company’s innovation is reflected in iPhones.
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-qualcomm-patent-infringement-verdict/
- Google faces third EU antitrust fine next week: source
Alphabet unit Google is likely to be hit with a third EU antitrust fine next week related to its AdSense advertising service, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, with the sanction expected to be much smaller than previous fines.
The AdSense case may not be end of Google’s EU antitrust woes.
EU antitrust enforcers have asked Google’s rivals if it unfairly demotes local search competitors, according to a questionnaire seen by Reuters, a move which could lead to a fourth case.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-antitrust-idUSKCN1QW1X0
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash