Daily Tech News 13 June 2025

• Google in the wiring closet with a lead pipe: The internet went down. It was Google's fault. (Tech Crunch)

  Google Cloud said it started investigating service issues affecting its customers at 11:46 a.m. PT. As of 2:23 p..m PT, the company said it had implemented mitigations, and expects to have its services back up and running within the hour.

  You started investigating issues 44 minutes after I was woken up by the outage? Good work, guys.

  At 11:19 a.m. PT, Cloudflare also said it was investigating service disruptions affecting its customers, according to its status page. At 12:12 p.m. PT, Cloudflare said it was starting to see its services recover after investigating the issue.

  Cloudflare KV was affected by the Google outage, and it in turn took down the rest of Cloudflare.
  
  And that took down everyone else, since Cloudflare handles about 20% of web traffic worldwide, so it's a rare site - like this one - that doesn't depend on it.
  
  Also, yes, they did post that note at 12:12 PM, but the "starting to see" does a lot of heavy lifting there. An hour later and our sites at work that are routed through Cloudflare were still completely dead.

  "This is a Google Cloud outage," said Cloudflare spokesperson Ripley Park in an email to TechCrunch. "A limited number of services at Cloudflare use Google Cloud and were impacted. We expect them to come back shortly. The core Cloudflare services were not impacted."

  The core Cloudflare services were not impacted, it was just that you couldn't reach them because everything else was on fire.

• AMD pre-announced its upcoming Zen 6 "Venice" server CPUs, and a little reading between the lines shows some significant changes. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These will lift the maximum core count from 192 to 256, increase performance by 70%, double I/O bandwidth, and increase memory bandwidth from 614GB per second (per CPU) to 1.6TB per second.
  
  More and faster cores is pretty normal, but doubling I/O bandwidth sounds like PCIe 6.0, which is exactly twice as fast as PCIe 5.0.
  
  That memory speed sounds like magic, though. Gen 3 MRDIMMs would achieve that - with an effective transfer rate of 17.6GHz, by running multiplexing two or more chips per module at the same time - but MRDIMMs announced so far only deliver half that speed.
  
  
  
• AMD also announced its MI350X and MI355X AI GPUs, which have stuff. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  288GB of RAM and 256 CUs - compared with 16GB of RAM and 64 CUs on the latest 9070 XT consumer cards. And 8TB per second of memory bandwidth compared with "only" 640GB per second.
  
  These are a slightly different design though, optimised for AI, called CDNA as opposed to RDNA used in AMD's laptop chips and consumer graphics cards.
  
  The next generation promises to provide "UDNA" which will unify the two designs.
  
  
  
• Anker is recalling over a million power banks because they catch fire. (The Verge)
  
  A good reason I suppose.
  
  
  
• Meta has bought a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.9 billion. (Yahoo)
  
  Scale AI is not an AI company. It's a people company that uses actual intelligence to weed out bullshit before it is fed into new AI systems to drive them mad.
  
  
  
• Evergreen headline: Free VPN apps you've never heard of on Apple and Google's app stores are run by China and watch everything you do online. (Tech Transparency Project)
  
  These include the fourth-ranked VPN on Apple's App Store and the eleventh-ranked VPN on Google Play. Many of them offer in-app purchases, so they charge you and steal your data.
  
  
  
• The Bluesky backlash misses the point. (Tech Crunch)
  
  No it doesn't.

  Without a more direct push to showcase the wider network of apps built on the open protocol that Bluesky's team spearheaded, it was only a matter of time before the Bluesky brand became pigeon-holed as the liberal and leftist alternative to X.

  There is no wider network of apps. Yes, the protocol is nominally open, but has no significant use. Bluesky is it right now.
  
  So the backlash against Bluesky's totalitarian censorship - welcomed and enforced by Bluesky's own users - is exactly the point.

  Already, people are using the protocol that powers Bluesky to build social experiences for specific groups - like Blacksky is doing for the Black online community or like Gander Social is doing for social media users in Canada.

  Canada is not a real place.
  
  Though to be fair neither is Bluesky.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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