Whoa! It’s been a week. I made it back home alive after Mark’s visit to DC. It’s another Thursday, and I’m back in the saddle with Mark Starling, Seth, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s top tech stories: Facebook was down for the count, small businesses lose out, and Windows 11 launches with new Start button. You can listen to Mark and I point and laugh while talking about the wild and crazy technology world every Thursday morning, LIVE at 6:43am Eastern.
FACEBOOK WENT DOWN FOR HOURS: MEMES WIN
On Monday, the Big Blue App family went down for almost six hours. For an app where people check the screen several times an hour, it was an eternity. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were also down because all network paths travel to Facebook. The culprit? Somewhere in the bowels of Internetwork configurations, the Internet routing that points web browsers to Facebook.com were removed or misconfigured. Facebook issued a statement, “configuration changes on the backbone routers,” caused the outage. Computer networks need routers to point non-rememberable Internet addresses to Facebook.com. When these settings got messed up, your Facebook service did too. The conspiracy theorists believe the outage was prompted by Facebook whistle blower, Frances Haugen’s interview on 60 minutes. She was the person who left Facebook and delivered copies of internal memos to the Wall Street Journal. Honestly, this outage was caused by something stupid. Someone fat fingered something or uploaded the wrong configuration file. It happens ALL THE TIME.
since FB and IG is down, Twitter Party yall'!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/c1XKbCDtte
— domo (@D_Omogggg) October 4, 2021
FACEBOOK COST SMALL BUSINESSES REAL MONEY
It was estimated that Facebook lost about $100 million during Monday’s outage. The outage also removed $6 billion of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal fortune and $40 billion of the company’s market value. Today, many small businesses are using Facebook and Instagram as the sole source of their lead generation and sales. Many entrepreneurs were making hundreds and thousands of dollars per day on these social platforms. The outage made small business owners realize multiple sales channels are still a reality and relying on one company’s infrastructure isn’t the best practice.
WINDOWS 11 LAUNCHES WITH UPGRADED EXPERIENCE
Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system launched on Tuesday. The latest operating system has a number of upgrades and changes with some changes making a comeback from Windows Vista. Windows has adopted rounded corners for icons and windows which users have become familiar with from phones and tablets. Widgets have made a comeback and are available via a retractable sidebar. And, the Start button has now been placed in the center of the screen. One new feature may keep users from upgrading. Microsoft has imposed a minimum requirement that a user’s PC must have a new TPM, Trusted Platform Module, security chip for the Windows 11 upgrade. If your computer doesn’t have it, you’ll have to buy a new PC. The TPM is a cryptographic chip used by security programs.