Google outage impacts millions
A major outage at Google impacted millions across the world.
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Chris Griffith 11.25pm: Google outage impacts millions
A major outage at Google impacted millions across the world. Google said it affected the majority of its users.
Access to Google accounts, GMail, YouTube, Drive, Play, Photos, Discord, Google Home and G-Suite were all affected late on Monday evening AEDT, according to downdetector.com.au.
The outage not only impacted Australia; US and UK media reported an outage due to issues with Google servers there. They reported that millions were affected.
The outage on G Suite meant businesses that depend on Google GMail had issues communicating. Users reported they could not watch YouTube movies or access or store their files with Google Drive. The loss of Google Home meant that smart home control failed.
“We‘re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users,” Google said on the Google Workspace Status Dashboard. “The affected users are unable to access Gmail,” one statement said.
Google made a similar statement about these other services: Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites, Groups, Hangouts, Chat, Meet, Vault, Current, Forms, Cloud Search, Keep, Tasks and Voice.
Later, Google reported that these services had been restored. “Gmail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change,” it said.
Google made the same statement for the other listed services. At this stage, there is no information as to the root cause of the failure.
The outage will remind some individuals and companies of the depth of their dependence on Google and how their own internal communication system and functionality can be brought undone by that dependence.
3.45pm: Telstra lands $130m WA schools deal
Telstra will deliver a broadband boost to 766 West Australian public schools, under a $130m deal announced Monday.
The partnership will see Telstra deliver base bandwidth of 2 mbps to every student and staff member from early 2021, with 94 per cent of the state’s schools to receive the upgrades.
The telco said in a statement that upgrade represents a 20-fold improvement on current speeds, while for some schools in regional areas the boost could be as much as 200-times.
“This agreement means more than 97 percent of public schools will receive an average bandwidth increase of more than 20 times, with many receiving much higher increases,” Education and Training Minister Sue Ellery said.
“It will provide modern and immersive learning opportunities for students and bring equity in bandwidth between metropolitan and regional schools and their communities.”
10.20am: Roblox delays IPO
Roblox delayed its planned IPO after company officials decided that the gravity-defying performance this week of Airbnb and DoorDash made it too difficult to determine the right price for the videogame company’s shares.
Roblox had been set to go public in December, part of a year-end rush of companies seeking to tap the red-hot market for initial public offerings. Just like with other recent issues, the San Mateo, California, company, valued at around $US4 billion earlier this year, was expected to draw strong investor demand.
But it announced to employees in a memo late Friday that the listing would be delayed until early next year.
The surprise move comes at the tail end of a week to remember in the IPO market. Shares of DoorDash and Airbnb soared beyond expectations when they began trading Wednesday and Thursday, respectively.
The companies, which have yet to turn consistent profits, are now valued at $US97 billion and $US65 billion, respectively, on a fully diluted basis. Shares of artificial-intelligence-software company C3.ai Inc. also spiked on their first day of trading.
The first-day pops have raised questions about the system of pricing IPOs. When shares jump like Airbnb’s and DoorDash’s did, the companies miss out on billions of dollars they might have raised and instead hand them to investors, some of whom are only in it to make a quick buck.
“Based on everything we have learned to date, we feel there is an opportunity to improve our specific process for employees, shareholders and future investors both big and small,” Roblox Chief Executive David Baszucki said in the memo, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. He added that the company’s business is strong.
Roblox operates a free online platform that has millions of games created by its own players with tools the company provides. It generates revenue by selling virtual currency to users called Robux for purchasing in-game perks such as virtual pets or accessories for customizing the look of their avatars. The company has benefited as the pandemic has supercharged demand for online gaming.
The Wall Street Journal
10.00am: Tech firms leave Silicon Valley for Texas
The San Francisco Bay Area had strained to absorb the torrid growth of the tech sector. As headcounts of highly paid engineers swelled, housing costs soared, traffic gridlock rose and homeless tents spread on city streets.
Now a small-but-prominent roster of tech companies and investors are doing something about it: leaving.
The region’s latest emigrant is database giant Oracle, a fixture of Silicon Valley for decades that last year signed a 20-year deal to put its name on the San Francisco Giants’ stadium, Oracle Park. The $180 billion tech giant on Friday said it had changed its headquarters location to Austin from Redwood City, California.
Oracle provided few details, saying it is implementing more flexible remote-work policies but wouldn’t move staff. It follows an announcement earlier this month by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, another business-technology company with deep roots in Silicon Valley, that it is moving its headquarters to Houston — as well as similar moves by a number of well-known venture capitalists announced in recent months.
Elon Musk, who had long lived in Los Angeles and commuted to Tesla’s operations near San Francisco, last week said he had moved to Texas. And he criticised the policies of the state as restrictive — echoing the arguments of many of those leaving the Bay Area.
These high-profile departures are causing some soul searching in Silicon Valley — taking some sheen off the area’s reputation as the unparalleled tech capital. While reasons vary, many moves appear to have been sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic that has reshaped notions of where and how we work, and companies, investors and employees are generally moving to places that are warmer, with lower taxes and cost of living.
“Covid basically encouraged people to work remotely and experiment with other places to live,” said Keith Rabois, a well-known San Francisco-based venture capitalist moving to Miami.
Mr. Rabois, a Republican often at odds with policies enacted by San Francisco’s liberal government, said he was frustrated with declining quality-of-life issues like homelessness and the state’s relatively high taxes, among other issues, and he realised he could do his job well from afar.
“It became clear there were much better places to live,” he said. Despite the moves, Silicon Valley’s place in global technology is still unrivalled. Five of the eight most valuable U.S. companies are based in the region. Major employers like Facebook and Google parent Alphabet have added office space in the region even during the pandemic. And the Bay Area has continued to churn out major new companies that captivate investors.
The week of Oracle’s announcement, delivery-company DoorDash Inc. and homesharing company Airbnb Inc. went public with soaring valuations.
Venture-capital funding this year has continued to go to Bay Area start-ups at disproportionate levels, even though the pandemic has made in-person meetings with investors there uncommon.
Once offices reopen, even if a large chunk of workers stay remote, many investors and executives say the value of proximity is so high that they expect the region’s prominence to continue.
Patrick Eggen, co-founder of the venture-capital firm Counterpart Ventures, says his firm’s location in San Francisco’s South Park neighbourhood has been critical to its success — and will be after the pandemic.
“My business is all relationship oriented. In-person meetings are the artery of that existence,” he said. “It gives me an edge being here.” Even if the Bay Area’s dominance is reduced, “you still have the highest concentration of talent, companies and capital,” he said. “The cluster is still here.” That clustering is considered a major reason for Silicon Valley’s dominance. Large companies grow off each other, with engineers leaving established companies to create their own start-ups, and rivals constantly poaching from one another. Investors often say they are more comfortable funding companies in their backyards.
Still, as the tech sector has gone from a niche to America’s dominant industry, the region has strained to keep up, leading to growing discomfort.
Between 2005 and 2019, employment in the five counties that make up the bulk of the Bay Area grew by 29%, adding 674,000 jobs, according to California’s Employment Development Department. Yet construction permits were issued for just 211,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Planners say the ratio of new jobs to new housing units should be around 1.5 to one.
The result has been soaring prices for housing and cost of living, which in turn fuels ever higher costs for paying employees.
Well before the pandemic, tech companies began adding offices in places like Seattle, Nashville and Austin. Salesforce.com Inc., whose Salesforce Tower headquarters dominates San Francisco’s skyline, has in recent years put the same name on buildings in Indianapolis, New York and Chicago. Financial-tech company Stripe Inc., which had been hiring engineers to work remotely before the pandemic, this year offered employees $20,000 to move elsewhere — and accept a reduced salary based on the location.
“There’s a finite space in the Valley, and there’s a need to scale and continue to expand,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based cloud company.
Six years ago, Mr. Levie opened up a small office in Austin. Now, it is Box’s largest outside of Silicon Valley, with several hundred employees. Given the growing size of the tech sector, he said, it will need “to attract talent wherever it can.” With a sizeable tech workforce, plus lower housing costs and no state taxes on income or capital gains, Austin has been a popular destination. Apple Inc. last year said it was adding a large new facility in the area, and Tesla is building its second U.S. factory there.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler said in an interview that many of the tech companies come without being courted. He said he was unaware of Oracle’s plan until Friday, when the company announced it. “As you start building a critical mass, it feels like there are more and more people expressing an interest,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal
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