By Welcome to another edition of Geeker's Cloud Digest, a digest of several cloud related news from the past days and week found all over the Internet and on other blogs (such as allesnurgecloud).
Microsoft (Office 365) worldwide outage
Microsoft experienced a worldwide outage of their cloud-based services. Office 365 (or short O365) services, such as Outlook or Teams, was unavailable to all users worldwide on January 25th.
The outage took several hours until the source of the problem was found; a network configuration change:
Microsoft isn't the first Big Tech company causing a major outage on their own. Meta (Facebook) did something similar on October 4th 2021. A routing configuration change was pushed causing all public networks from Meta to go down and even locking out their own IT departments.
Shopify to cancel meetings to boost productivity
Shopify, a large e-commerce provider, has announced to purge meetings from employees calendars. Of course you can't cancel all meetings, but to boost productivity the company has removed the following types of meetings:
- Recurring meetings with more than 3 invitees
- All meetings on Wednesday's
- Conferences with more than 50 people
- Big conferences are only allowed to be held in a certain time slop on Thursday's
By applying these rules, more than 10,000 events were removed from employee's calendars and 76,500 meeting hours were saved – which can now be used for other (more productive?) tasks.
Bitwarden acquires passwordless.dev
Bitwarden is a well known open source software for managing passwords, a.k.a. Password Manager. It can be installed on premise as self-hosted application or can be used as SaaS (Software as a Service). After the recent demise of challenger LastPass (due to lack of Security), a lot of changes seem to rattle the password community.
In order to extend the services, Bitwarden announced they acquired Passwordless.dev, a Europen startup focused on passkeys and FIDO2 WebAuthn features such as Face ID, pringerprints and Windows Hello.
New releases from SUSE Rancher
SUSE released new versions of the widely used Rancher, a Kubernetes management software. The software currently exists in three parallel versions: 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7. The new releases are 2.5.17, 2.6.10 and 2.7.1 and contain multiple security fixes (also fixing multple CVE vulnerabilities). The Rancher 2.7.1 release is the first update since Rancher 2.7 was launched in November 2022.
Remarkable is the release of version 2.5.17, as Rancher 2.5 was officially already EOL (End Of Life) in October 2022. The same important security fixes and a secrious bug in 2.5.16 (which might cause a major problem with downstream clusters after updating Rancher 2.5.15 to 2.5.16) probably led to the decision to make a final release. SUSE states:
This release concludes support for Rancher 2.5. Please upgrade to a newer version of Rancher for continued support.
Swiss e-commerce Digitec/Galaxus publishes product returns
Switzerland's largest e-commerce company Digitec/Galaxus (owned by Switzerland's largest retailer Migros Group), announced to publish product returns on their online shops Galaxus and Digitec. The brutally honest statistics reveal to end-users which brands have less issues and therefore can be trusted more.
Looking at graphic cards comparison, here's a statistic of warranty returns of many graphic card vendors. The graphic also shows (on the right hand side) how long it usually takes to replace a product:
This is certainly a very interesting and honest approach and consumers can profit from these statistics. It would be great if other/international online shops would follow this example.
Yandex source code leaked
The source code of Yandex, Russia's biggest Internet company, was publicly leaked this week on BreachForums. The leak was analyzed and confirmed by Arseniy Shestakov, a software engineer.
The leaked code contains the source code for all major services Yandex provides, such as
- Search Engine and Indexing Bot
- Maps (similar to Google Maps and Street View)
- Alice (AI Assistant comparable to Siri/Alexa)
- Taxi (online taxi service, just like Uber)
- Direct, Mail, Disk, Market, Travel, and others
It is unknown who leaked the source code and for what purpose.
