Mr. Bezos is on the phone for you…
If you thought that mistaken “reply all” you hit in response to that HR email was bad, well, just be thankful you’re not a probably now-fired Amazon Web Services employee whose typo took down a large part of the internet earlier this week. In a post, Amazon says someone trying to streamline a billing system keyed something in incorrectly and instead of a few servers taking a timeout, Trello, Quora and a big chunk of the internet did.
Looks like the command/CTRL –Z “undo” approach didn’t work as it took nearly 5 hours to get everything back to normal. Amazon hosts a huge number of major Internet players, including Netflix, reddit, and Airbnb, and Amazon says they are making changes to make sure the mistake cannot be repeated.
Cash or cheque?
They’re rolling in dough over at Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, as their big IPO got investors excited yesterday, and now comes news from Variety that media giant NBC-Universal was a particularly optimistic buyer of Snap stock. You may have put a few thousand bucks in for some ground-floor trades, but NBC dropped half a billion dollars on their buy-in, and it’s not the first time they’ve gone big on digital media.
According to CNBC, the peacock also has a $400 million stake in BuzzFeed, and another $200 million invested in Vox. Other buys puts NBC’s total “new media” speculation at $1.5 billion so far. And, so far, so good, too: Snap’s stock surged after the IPO, turning NBC’s $500 million gamble into a $720 million holding. NBC says they will sit on the stock for a year, so we’ll see things play out down the road.
You might want to upgrade those earbuds
Good news for golden-eared music fans: it appears Spotify is toying with the idea of a high-resolution audio option, and fittingly, subscribers will also qualify for discounts if they want to buy music on vinyl. The folks at Android Headlines say some tweets late last month hint that Spotify is looking at a CD-quality Hi-Fi audio option that will cost between $5 and $10 a month.
They also say that subscribers will get a free vinyl record if they sign up, although, what record that might be was not specified. In case you didn’t know, that music coming out of your phone is pretty “low-fi” due to all the compression needed to send it through the wireless interwebs, and a high-quality option is one way Spotify might be able to offer something the other players don’t – although everyone else could offer it as well, eventually.
