Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini How to claim Verizon's $20 credit for Wednesday's service outage It isn't applied automatically, because of course it isn't. Verizon is offering a very small after Wednesday's massive outage, which drew more than 1.5 million reports on Downdetector and lasted hours. The carrier posted on X that it will offer a $20 credit, but customers must redeem it in the myVerizon app. This credit isn't meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can, the company wrote.

After more than a month of sporadic outages that left many Sengled smart bulb users struggling to control their lights, Amazon has opted to pull the skill that allowed Sengled users to control their bulbs with Alexa. Some Sengled bulbs may still offer Alexa control directly via Zigbee, Matter, or Bluetooth connectivity, thus bypassing the yanked Alexa skill. But Sengled bulbs that can't be connected directly to Alexa will no longer be controllable via the voice assistant, Amazon said. Sengled lights and devices may still be controllable using the Sengled app or other smart home platforms, although the status of those connections still appears to be spotty. "We hold a high bar for the Alexa experience," an Amazon spokesperson told TechHive.

Over the last two decades, the evolution of IT has been more like something a revolution--in some cases, the transformation even unpinning real-life uprisings. Today we're acutely aware of advances in technology and the internet, particularly as the global COVID-19 pandemic creates a sweeping reliance on tele-everything and online commerce to sustain companies' livelihood. The current surge in online traffic underscores the massive strides made across IT, ensuring critical support functions largely go uninterrupted--quietly impacting millions of lives. Behind the scenes, ITOps teams continue working to ensure the customer experience is resilient and incidents are addressed even before end users notice an issue. The irony of these seamless digital experiences, though, is that the delivery is built on escalating complexity.

Four articles, published across the March through May issues of Communications, highlight how people are the unique source of the adaptive capacity essential to incident response in modern Internet-facing software systems. While it's reasonable for software engineering and operations communities to focus on the intricacies of technology, there is not much attention given to the intricacies of how people do their work. Ultimately, it is human performance that makes modern business-critical systems robust and resilient. As business-critical software systems become more successful, they necessarily increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes these systems inherently messy so that surprising incidents are part and parcel of the capability to provide services at larger scales and speeds.13

Businesses understand the importance of providing seamless customer journeys, but we've seen a growing spate of digital service outages and software performance problems in recent months. There have been online banking outages that have left customers unable to pay bills on time, while problems with major payment systems have left shoppers unable to use their bank cards at the checkouts. These problems seriously disrupt peoples' ability to live their day-to-day lives, so they're becoming a growing concern for businesses and consumers alike. So, if businesses understand the importance of providing seamless customer journeys, why are outages happening more often? The soaring complexity of technology ecosystems is the biggest contributor to the rise in software performance problems. Modern digital services reside in complex hybrid multi-cloud environments, spanning multiple platforms and technologies.