Morning, friends. We’ve got five bits of tech news for your Tuesday.
1. Optus finds root cause of outage
Optus has broken its silence, yesterday saying it traced the issue behind the other day’s outage back to “changes to routing information from an international peering network following a software upgrade”. The telco said these routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in its network and “exceeded preset safety levels on key routers” which, “resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves”.
2. Amazon nukes 180 jobs which is totally fine
Another day, another round of video game industry layoffs. This time Amazon is laying off roughly 180 employees from its gaming division, as confirmed by Aftermath in an internal email from Christoph Hartmann, VP of Amazon Games. Per our friends over at Kotaku Australia, these layoffs include the entire staff of the Amazon-owned Twitch channel known as Crown Channel. The site was able to confirm with Amazon that the layoffs were happening and received a copy of the email sent by Hartmann to company employees.
3. Google gives Apple 36% of Safari Search revenue
Over to Bloomberg now and it’s reporting on a slip-up made by University of Chicago professor Kevin Murphy during his testimony in the Google antitrust trial. He revealed that Google gives Apple a 36 per cent cut of all Search ad revenue that comes from Safari. As The Verge notes, Google has long paid to be the default search engine in Safari and other browsers like Firefox, spending $US26.3 billion in 2021 on it. $US18 billion of that went to Apple, but the specifics of where the number came from remained secret until now.
4. Tourism NT needs a chatbot, for some reason
AI news now and Tourism Northern Territory has launched ChatNT, which it has pitched as an “Australian-first AI innovation, powered by Microsoft and fronted by media personality Abbie Chatfield”. Chatfield is also Tourism NT’s ‘chief sensory officer for Summer in the NT’ – whatever tf that means. Tourism NT reckons the bot is a tongue-in-cheek play on Chatfield’s last name, but literally ChatGPT is already a thing so they’re not getting away with thinking this is innovative. To make you cringe once more, here’s the blurb: “ChatNT is an AI travel tool that seamlessly blends technology and adventure, offering inspiration and advice for those planning a summer getaway in the Northern Territory”.
5. Meta realises Threads is annoying
Lastly, TechCrunch brought to our attention the fact that Instagram’s Threads will now let users turn off automatic sharing of their Threads posts to other apps, including Instagram and Facebook. We fizzled out interest on Threads, much like many of the people who flocked there at the start, but Meta sees this as a move to hopefully gain more traction and interest in its Twitter/X rival.
BONUS ITEM: This is causing debate in the Gizmodo Australia office, so we wanted to include you all.
Have a great day.
Image: AP Photo/Michael Sohn