Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/05 – The Great Facebook Outage

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

About that Facebook outage yesterday… A Google moonshot project has a surprise profit. But only because its propping up other Alphabet bets. And then, it’s review day. What you can expect if you download Android 12. What you can expect if you download Windows 11. And what you’ll get if you buy one of those Microsoft Surface Laptop Studios. Sponsors: Grammarly.com/techmeme Stripe.com Links: PSA: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp went down for 6+ hours; here’s why [U] (9to5Mac) Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook (NYTimes) Google’s AI unit DeepMind makes first-ever profit (Financial Times) ANDROID 12 REVIEW: IT’S MOSTLY ABOUT THE LOOKS (The Verge) WINDOWS 11 REVIEW: A FAMILIAR HOME THAT’S STILL BEING RENOVATED (The Verge) Microsoft's Surface Laptop Studio Does It All (Gizmodo) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, October 5th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. About that Facebook outage yesterday. Also, a Google Moonshot project has a surprise profit, but only because it's propping up other alphabet bets, and then it's review day. What can you expect if you download Android 12,

what you can expect if you download Windows 11, and what you'll get if you buy one of those Microsoft Surface Laptop Studios. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. of you tweeted at me, Brian, how did you not cover that big Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp outage yesterday? But here's the thing. Word of the outage started trickling in right as I was finishing up the show yesterday. And I mean, look, various services go down all the time. Today, it might be Gmail, tomorrow Discord, you name it. And sure, any outage is news for a few hours when it's actually happening. But then it gets fixed, usually, and people forget about it. rightfully so. And if I reported on every single service outage, it's like if I reported on every single

hack or cyber attack. If I reported every hack or every service outage every day, we'd do a story like that every day. It would be annoying. So I do try to hold my powder until there's a big one, or there's an outage or hack that's unique in some way. And I had no idea an hour into yesterday's outage that it would be an interesting one. But here we are. Facebook's services and work tools. have returned online after suffering a global outage for over six hours yesterday. Quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The outage affected every Facebook-owned platform, according to data on Down Detector and Twitter. This included Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

The outages appear to have started around 1140 a.m. Eastern Time, 8.40 p.m. Pacific time yesterday, and all of those services remained inaccessible for at least six hours. Cybercrime reporter Brian Krebs attributes it to, a major DNS problem. Crabs explains that the DNS records that tell systems how to find Facebook and Instagram, quote, got withdrawn this morning from the global routing cables, end quote. At this point, however, it's unclear how that happened. Crabbs wrote in a blog post, quote, Facebook and its sister properties, Instagram, and WhatsApp are surfing from ongoing global outages. We don't yet know why this happened, but the how is clear. Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to

revoke key digital records that tell computers and other internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online. In simpler terms, sometime this morning, Facebook took away the map telling the world's computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error message, end quote. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that even Facebook wasn't entirely sure what the root cause of the issue was, quote, several hours into the incident, Facebook security experts were still trying to identify the root issue according to an internal memo and employees briefed on the matter. Two members of its security team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because

they were not authorized to speak publicly, said it was unlikely that a cyber attack had taken place because one hack was unlikely to affect so many apps at once, end quote. Actually quoting from a later piece in the times, Facebook said late Monday, the culprit was changes to its underlying internet infrastructure that coordinates the traffic between its data centers. That interrupted communications and cascaded to other data centers, quote, bringing our services to a halt, the company said. Facebook eventually restored service after a team got access to its server computers at a data center in Santa Clara, California, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

Then they were able to reset them, end quote. Also, Cloudflare was reporting that prior to Facebook's outage, Facebook issued several BGP updates, which caused DNS resolution errors that knocked Facebook off the web. And what I and others have also heard is that Facebook as an organization was so disrupted by this. Folks couldn't even get into their offices because key cards wouldn't work. Folks were trying to organize meetings by, God forbid, calling people on their cell phones. Facebook, in case you weren't aware, runs a lot of its internal processes on modified versions of the Facebook productivity platform. And the problem was only resolved when engineers physically went to key data centers to reset things.

And even then, the rumor floating around last night was that they had to bring in a guy with an angle grinder to even get access to the server cages. No way of knowing if that is true or not, but it sounds so delicious. Why not make it be true? Anyway, you know, a couple of tweets from yesterday. There was obviously a ton of snark, but I like this one from Mike Maznick, quote, Don't set your physical door locks to need the very same DNS entry that your entire system uses because stuff might go wrong, end quote. And also I like this from Steve Klabnick, quote, Do you think the crack team Facebook sent into the data server was like retired in a remote location when their special little phone rang?

They picked it up and yelled, I'm out of the game and have been for a long time. Okay, one last mission, end quote. According to a filing, Google's DeepMind reported 826 million pounds of revenue in 2020, which was up 3x year over year, and thus led to a 46 million pound pre-tax profit, its first ever profit. And also, might this be the first ever profit for a Google Moonshot company full stop? But, quoting the financial times, deep minds revenues are derived entirely from applying its technology to commercial alphabet projects. The heavy spending reflects the rising costs of talent as big tech companies race against each other to develop AI technology. Tenured university professors have been offered up to 10 times their academic salaries to work for the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Deep Mind said, quote, during this reporting period, we made significant progress in our mission of solving intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. Our groundbreaking results in protein structure prediction were heralded as one of the most significant contributions AI has made to advancing scientific knowledge, end quote. It added that it was proud, its research is now, quote, powering products and infrastructure that improve the lives of billions of people, end quote. The deep mind for Google team, which embeds its AI technology into other alphabet products, is split between London and California and now consists of about 100 employees, mostly engineers, working on a, quote, dozen efforts in different product areas within alphabet, including ads,

sales, shopping, YouTube, text to speech, cloud infra, and self-driving company Waymo, according to the LinkedIn profiles of employees, end quote. I told you it's review day, people. A whole bunch of things came out all at once, and I've got three of them for you, at least three reviews of these things that came out yesterday or today. First up, Android 12 got released yesterday, so here's Cameron Faulkner in The Verge. If you're lucky enough to get this on your device, you can look forward to big design improvements led by Material You, but the new widgets will need dev support to shine, and otherwise it's just basically a polished job, quote. For the most part, it's still Android. You can easily get by on the new update without using the smattering of new features that Google buried in the settings, though it's worth seeking out a few of them.

The most obvious change, which is also the biggest incentive for most people to download Android 12, is Google's new Material You Design. The company says it's the biggest design change in Android's history. I agree that it's significant since it basically makes stock Android look like a really good custom launcher. There's more color and more fun shapes throughout, and weirdest of all, widgets are officially a thing again. Samsung is a big manufacturer missing from the list of devices getting Android 12 today, though it has already committed to bringing the software to its Galaxy S-21 lineup from earlier this year in the form of its 1UI-4 update. A hands-on with the beta software published by XDA developers shows that Samsung's take on Android 12 doesn't seem to have the same pizzazz

as Google's treatment on pixel phones, but Google announced today, that it released the Android 12 source on Android open source project, but instead of releasing it broadly as it has in the past, pixel owners will need to wait a few more weeks. A Google spokesperson told the verge that it's, quote, putting the finishing touches on a special release with pixel exclusive and pixel first experiences on Android 12, end quote. Android 12 isn't an update that's trying to change how you use your phone, not that it needed to be. Instead of just tacking on dozens of new features, Google just wanted to shake things up in the design department for the sake of It's an upheaval of some of Android's smallest details.

It amounts to a more customizable experience, which in turn lets your phone look and feel more unique. If that gets you excited, you probably won't regret installing. But I wouldn't buy a pixel just to experience Android 12, and if you can't get the update today, I wouldn't fret too much until more features are added, end quote. That was yesterday, but today is Windows 11 day. For what to expect if you download Windows 11, Tom Warren at the Verge, says, it rocks an improved and modern UI and sounds, but also many promised features like Android apps are still missing to be delivered later, and the new task bar is a step back. First on that

task bar, because that's what people are up in arms about, and then his conclusion, quote, there's a new start menu that ditches the live tiles that were originally introduced in Windows 8. There's a new design that introduces rounded corners in place of Windows 10's sharp angles, and some depth and color to Windows. And there's a new Windows app store that's far more open with more of the apps you actually use on Windows. These changes alone make Windows 11 look different, but once you get used to them,

it's certainly the same feel of Windows underneath. Windows 11 is a refreshing approach to this old and familiar home, but it often feels like the home renovation phase isn't finished. Some features you might be familiar with are missing, others that were promised haven't arrived just yet, and there's still too much of the crusty old parts of Windows hanging around. If you're used to enabling small icons or ungrouping the icons on the taskbar, these features are gone in Windows 11. You also can't hide system icons from the system tray section

in the taskbar anymore, and right-clicking on the task bar only presents a settings shortcut instead of the task manager and other options that existed in Windows 10. I've already written about how I hate the Windows 11 taskbar, and I'm genuinely stunned Microsoft is shipping Windows 11 like this. While a lot of Windows 11 users won't even notice the taskbar changes, the feedback in Microsoft's Windows Insider program is clear. The top feedback items mostly relate to the task bar. Microsoft is aware and tells me it's in the process of better understanding the feedback and evaluating how some of the feedback fits into the company's Windows 11 plans. There's no guarantee that the task bar will change, but I'm hopeful Microsoft will bring back some of the missing features here. I've been running Windows 11

on my laptop and I enjoy the experience there, but on my desktop with three monitors, I'm holding off on upgrading. The way I use my laptop is very different from my desktop PC, so Windows 11 fits just fine in my lap. I regularly use full-screen apps and games on my main PC, so not being able to see the time and date across multiple monitors is annoying. Coupled with the taskbar changes that prevent drag and drop, I feel less productive using Windows 11 on my main PC. While this is the first time I'm holding off on a Windows upgrade on my main PC ever. I think for most people, Windows 11 will be a welcome improvement to a user interface that's really needed some love and attention over the years. It's not a necessary upgrade for anyone, though.

I can't point to a single feature in Windows 11 that's really worth upgrading instantly for. Instead, it's a collection of changes that make the OS feel more modern and easier to use. I wouldn't rush out to upgrade to Windows 11, but I also wouldn't avoid it. After all, Windows 11 still feels familiar, and underneath all the UI changes, changes, it's the same windows we've had for decades, end quote. And finally, let's turn to Gizmodo to talk about the device that I thought was the most interesting from that last Microsoft event last month. I'm speaking of the Surface Laptop Studio. Sam Rutherford says it's gorgeous with a unique design, great 120 hertz display, good battery life, and

Thunderbolt 4, but it is heavy and pricey, and it has fewer ports than maybe you would want. quote, for general use and productivity, the studio functions just like any other laptop. But when you want to draw or brainstorm some ideas on a whiteboard, you can simply pull the studio's display forward into what Microsoft calls stage mode, creating a perfect surface, pun intended, for all sorts of content creation. And then if you want a more low-profile drafting table setup, you can press down again to turn the studio into a big tablet, giving you another angle to work with, while also keeping the spirit of the Surface book alive. All in all, it's quite an experience.

The studio also sports a lovely 120-hertz screen, excellent brightness, upwards of 450 nits, and rich, accurate colors, making it feel like it's ready to help you work or create regardless if you're at home or on the road. One area where I think Microsoft may have stopped short, though, is that the studio's tilting screen only has a few preset resting points. You get laptop mode, stage mode, and tablet mode,

but if you want anything in between, you had better have a light hand, because the studio's hinge isn't really designed to hold its posture outside of those three main modes. This is a bit of a bummer because if my memory serves me right, this is the same weak point a bunch of early Surface pros suffered from until Microsoft upgraded their kickstands to support a stiffer hinge that could maintain its position at any angle. Like his predecessor, the Surface Laptop Studio feels like a special creature, And even though I really like what I've experienced thus far, I still feel like I'm just scratching

the surface of its potential. Microsoft has delivered a system with an excellent build, a vivid and super smooth display, and a refined design that provides a wealth of tools and premium features across the board. Microsoft even tacked on a handful of clever tweaks, like the drawing menu that pops up automatically from whenever you remove the stylus from its magnetic perch. However, the studio's biggest downside is that it ain't exactly cheap, starting at $1,600 for a core I-5 CPU with integrated graphics and going up to a minimum of $2,100 if you want that discrete RtX-3050 GPU. A fully loaded model with a GPU, 32 gigabytes of RAM, and a 2-terabyte SSD costs a wallet-clutching $3,100. But for artists who can appreciate all of Microsoft's subtle touches and fine details,

the Surface Laptop Studio feels like a curated device that blends high-tech with useful features, end quote. My wife and I had our first official date night last night since Valentine's Day 2020. Went to the Banksy exhibit that is currently on 14th Street in Manhattan, in case any of you are in town and want to see it. It was good, but as I've seen several Banksy pieces out in the wild over the years, there was even one about a block away on 15th Street, maybe eight years ago. It was sort of weird. And art gallery is not really the place where Banksy's art has the best impact,

unlike, say, Barbara Kruger, because Kruger has her stuff out in the world too, on billboards and stuff like that. But if you bring all of her pieces together in a gallery, they have this sort of cumulative sensory overload effect that's maybe even more powerful. Banksy's power is when you see his stencils on a wall on the side of a gallery. a building, buy some dumpsters or something, it's better IRL. Anyway, still nice to have a night out, still nice to have a nice dinner, trip to an art gallery felt like old times. Talk to tomorrow.