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NASA video shows aurora and lightening flash across U.S.

admin - Latest News - November 23, 2025
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NASA video shows aurora and lightening flash across U.S.



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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleNov. 23, 2025, 5:00 AM ESTBy Kevin CollierIt’s not just you — internet outages severe enough to disrupt everyday services for many people have become more frequent and wide-ranging, experts say.When internet services company Cloudflare crashed Tuesday — prompting significant, hourslong disruptions at companies ranging from X to OpenAI to Discord — it was the third major internet outage in the space of about a month.While there’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around, two things are clear: Popular consumer businesses increasingly rely on a handful of giant companies that run things more cheaply in the cloud, and when one of those companies isn’t extraordinarily careful, an obscure software vulnerability or tiny mistake can reverberate through to many of their customers, making it seem like half the internet has been unplugged.“This spate of outages has been uniquely terrible,” said Erie Meyer, the former chief technical officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the Biden administration. “It’s like what we were told Y2K would be like, and it’s happening more often.”It’s become a common enough occurrence that jokes about the failures, rooted in an understanding of the basics of internet infrastructure, have become popular memes in the computer science world.Major cloud companies are often referred to as hyperscalers, meaning once they have established a viable business, it can be relatively straightforward to rapidly build out their infrastructure and offer those services at competitive prices. That has resulted in a handful of companies dominating the industry, which critics note creates single points of failure when something goes wrong.“When one company’s bug can derail everyday life, that’s not just a technical issue, that’s consolidation,” Meyer said.Outages are as old as the internet. But since late October there have been three major ones — an unprecedented number for such a short span of time — that caused serious problems for wide swaths of people.The first was Amazon Web Services on Oct. 20, taking with it many people’s access to everything from gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite to Ring cameras. It reportedly kept some from being able to operate their internet-connected smart beds.Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a long-standing critic of the tech industry, wrote on X after the AWS outage that it was a reason “to break up Big Tech.”“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big. Period,” she said.Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, went down on Oct. 29, rendering a host of the company’s services inoperable around the globe just before its quarterly report. Those two outages each caused major headaches for at least two airlines, preventing passengers from checking in online: Delta, which uses AWS, and Alaska, which uses Azure.Then came Cloudflare’s disruption Tuesday, which CEO Matthew Prince said was the company’s worst since 2019.“We are sorry for the impact to our customers and to the Internet in general,” he wrote in a technical explanation after the outage. “Given Cloudflare’s importance in the Internet ecosystem any outage of any of our systems is unacceptable,” he added. “That there was a period of time where our network was not able to route traffic is deeply painful to every member of our team. We know we let you down today.”The three companies each dealt with different issues. Cloudflare initially thought it was under a massive cyberattack, but then traced the issue to a “bug” in its software to combat bots. AWS and Microsoft each had different issues configuring their services with the Domain Name System, or DNS, the notoriously finicky “phonebook” for the internet that connects website URLs with their technical, numerical addresses.Those issues come a year after a particularly unusual case, in which companies around the world that used both Microsoft-based computers and the popular cybersecurity service CrowdStrike suddenly saw their systems crash and display the “blue screen of death.” The culprit was a glitch in what should have been a routine CrowdStrike automatic software update, leading to flight delays and medical and police networks going down for hours.Ultimately, each was an instance of a minor software glitch that rippled across those companies’ enormous systems, crashing website after website.Asad Ramzanali, the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, as well as the former deputy director for strategy at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden administration, called the tendency for giant companies to experience such wide-ranging outages a national risk. “This concentration is both a market failure and a national security risk when we have so much of society dependent on these layers of infrastructure,” he told NBC News.James Kretchmar, the chief technology officer of Akamai’s Cloud Technology Group — another cloud services giant — said that it is always possible for a cloud company’s engineers to reduce outages’ likelihood and severity, but that companies need to use them strategically.“You don’t have infinite nerds. But it’s not like this is something where you would have to throw your hands up and say, ‘There’s just no way,’” he said.There’s also some growing push for these outages to be treated as more than minor nuisances or the cost of doing business in the digital age.J.B. Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit that advocates for public interests, called for more government regulation of the cloud industry.“There needs to be investigations whenever these outages happen, because whether we like it or not, the entire infrastructure that our economy is kind of running on, digitally at least, is owned by a handful of companies, and that’s incredibly concerning,” he said.Kevin CollierKevin Collier is a reporter covering cybersecurity, privacy and technology policy for NBC News.
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 14, 2025, 7:00 AM EDTBy David IngramInstagram said Tuesday that it would overhaul its approach to teenagers’ accounts and try to crack down on their access to objectionable content after a firestorm of bad publicity over how teens use the social media app.Instagram, which is owned by Meta, announced a series of changes that it said were aimed at making teens’ experience on Instagram similar to viewing PG-13 movies, with equivalent restrictions on sexualized content and other adult material.One new restriction that Instagram said it would adopt is called age-gating: If an Instagram account regularly shares content that is age-inappropriate — for example, content related to alcohol or links to pornographic websites — then, the company said, it will block all teen accounts from being able to see or chat with that account. The age-gating could apply even to celebrities or other widely followed adult accounts, Instagram said. But it did not say precisely where it would draw the line for adult accounts that do not want to be age-gated. A company representative said sharing one piece of age-inappropriate content would not be enough for an adult-run account to lose access to the teen audience.Other apps, such as YouTube, also use age-gating to restrict access to certain types of content.A second new restriction on Instagram will block teens’ search results for a wider range of adult search terms, going beyond its current list of restricted terms, it says.The changes apply only to teen-specific accounts, which are accounts that teens have created using their truthful birth dates or accounts that Instagram has determined through its own investigation are likely to be those of people under 18 years old.It is common for teens to lie about their ages online to avoid certain restrictions. A 2024 survey of U.K. teens by the media regulator Ofcom found that 22% of 17-year-olds said they lied on social media that they were 18 or older.A representative for Instagram said it tries to catch teens who lie about their ages but declined to say how often it finds them doing so.In announcing the latest changes, Instagram said it was borrowing the thinking behind the PG-13 movie rating, which suggests “parental guidance” because of “some material parents might not like for their young children.” The film industry voluntarily released the modern film rating system in the 1960s when it, too, was facing the threat of government regulation.“Just like you might see some suggestive content or hear some strong language in a PG-13 movie, teens may occasionally see something like that on Instagram — but we’re going to keep doing all we can to keep those instances as rare as possible,” Instagram said in a statement.The company said that for teen accounts, it would hide or not recommend posts with strong language, certain risky stunts, sexually suggestive poses or marijuana paraphernalia. It also said artificial intelligence experiences for teens would be “guided by PG-13 ratings by default,” with limits on the types of responses given.It said the same content restrictions would apply until account holders become adults, providing the same experience to 17-year-olds as to 13-year-olds.Some parents have complained for years that Instagram, TikTok and other social media apps do not do enough to protect teens’ well-being. Last year, during a Senate hearing, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized to parents in the gallery who said Instagram contributed to their children’s deaths or exploitation.Instagram does not verify self-reported ages at sign-up in the United States, and Meta is a member of two trade associations, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, that have sued to block state laws that would require age verification. In June, the trade groups won injunctions against state-mandated age checks in Florida and Georgia.Instagram allows kids as young as 13 years old to create accounts. Last year, it introduced teen-specific accounts, saying all minors would be routed into such accounts automatically with limits on messaging and tagging.Instagram says teens have created millions of teen-specific accounts, although it has declined to say how many of those accounts remain active after they are created.Instagram is rolling out the overhaul after a withering year in the public spotlight. In August, Reuters reported that an internal Meta document permitted children to engage in “romantic or sensual” AI chats, including on an Instagram chatbot.In September, two former employees of Meta testified before Congress that the company blocked their research into teen safety in virtual reality and avoided adopting certain safety measures if those measures would mean fewer teens use the company’s apps, including Instagram and Facebook.“Children drive profits,” one of the former employees, Jason Sattizahn, said in an interview last month. “If Meta invests more in safety to get kids off of them, engagement goes down, monetization goes down, ad revenue goes down. They need them.”Meta at the time criticized Sattizahn’s testimony and the testimony of another former employee, Cayce Savage, saying that their claims were “nonsense” and they were “based on selectively leaked internal documents that were picked specifically to craft a false narrative.” It said it had no “blanket prohibition on conducting research with young people.”A report last month from several child safety groups, including Fairplay, criticized Instagram’s teen account features as failing to deliver substantial safety benefits. The report also urged that “recommendations made to a 13-year-old Teen Account should be reasonably PG rated.” Meta said that the report was misleading and that it misrepresented the company’s efforts.David IngramDavid Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.
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