Facebook says in-house ‘error’ caused outage; GM ramps up its electrification strategy |
Facebook: internal error led to outage
LONDON — The outage that knocked Facebook and its other platforms offline for hours this week was caused by an error during routine maintenance, the company said.
Santosh Janardhan, vice president of infrastructure, said in an Oct. 5 blog post that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp going dark was “caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.”
The problem occurred as engineers were carrying out day to day work on Facebook’s global backbone network; the computers, routers and software in its data centers around the world along with the fiber-optic cables connecting them.
“During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally,” Janardhan said.
GM spells out its EV sales ambitions
WARREN, Mich. — General Motors plans to cash in as the world switches from combustion engines to battery power, promising to double its annual revenue by 2030 with an array of new electric vehicles, profitable gas-powered cars and trucks, and services such as an electronic driving system that can handle most tasks on the road.
In announcements Oct. 6 ahead of a two-day investor event in Detroit, the company also pledged to unseat Tesla and become the electric vehicle market share leader in U.S., although no time frame was given.
The company also teased upcoming new electric vehicles including a Chevrolet small SUV that will cost around $30,000, as well as electric trucks from Chevrolet and GMC, crossover SUVs from Buick, and luxury vehicles from Cadillac.
The automaker plans to have more than half of its North American and China factories be capable of making electric vehicles by 2030.
GM took in $122.5 billion in revenue in 2020, a year that was depressed by the coronavirus pandemic. Doubling it would be close to $250 billion.
GM, GE to build rare earth supply chain
NEW YORK — General Motors and General Electric are looking at developing a supply chain of rare earth materials that help make electric…
