Tech
Global outage: why do websites keep going down?
This is happening so often now it’s become a trend – a number of popular websites around the world were taken offline just hours ago after a major outage
Affected sites include Airbnb, UPS, HSBC, British Airways and Playstation – with visitors to the sites being greeted with a “DNS error message”.
Although some pages in Europe and the US seemed to be accessible again, others in the Asia-Pacific region remained offline for a longer period.
DNS service provider, Akamai has taken responsibility for the issue and tweeted that “the service is now resuming normal operations”.
This is the second outage of its kind in two months – with consumers questioning whether similar issues will become more and more prevalent.
Are we seeing outages more often?
In June, we saw internet service provider Fastly go down, taking a large number of popular websites offline.
The websites who went offline included Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times.
Attempts to access the Financial Times website turned up a similar message while visits to the New York Times and U.K. government’s gov.uk site returned an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message, along with the line “Varnish cache server,” which is a technology that Fastly is built on.
Issues are popping up more frequently when it comes to outages, so is it of concern to users?
The outages, while temporary, are raising concerns about the number of websites that rely on just a few content delivery networks like Fastly and Akamai, creating a more fragile internet ecosystem.
WhatsApp ramps up privacy features to prevent subscriber loss
The world’s two billion plus WhatsApp users will soon have greater privacy controls with new platform changes on the way.
Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new WhatsApp updates in a Facebook post earlier this week.
Users will be able to make a stealthy exit from group conversations without the rest of the participants being notified.
Other changes include allowing users the ability to check messages without others knowing and controlling who sees when they are online.
These functions have been flagged as being rolled out to WhatsApp users over the next month.
Even more significant to user privacy is a function that is still under development.
Here, WhatsApp users can allow their messages to be viewed only once with an added screenshot blocking feature.
This will prevent other users saving their communication onto their phones for future reference.
The changes have been announced after Meta was scrutinised last year for their data sharing practices after an update of its Terms of Service.
Users were concerned over suggestions WhatsApp user data would be shared and utilised by parent company Meta.
WhatsApp has always boasted about the benefits of its end-to-end encryption preventing.
The news that WhatsApp planned to share user data more widely with Meta shook users’ faith in the platform.
As the third most popular social media platform, it seems Meta is keen to retain this market share by increasing its privacy features.
Some would say this is both to allay security fears and to prevent them from moving to other popular messaging apps such as Signal.
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