There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled. 
The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

In the southernmost part of Tamil Nadu, near a tiger reserve in Mundanthurai, and the cities of Tenkasi and Tirunelveli, is a village where Zoho Corp Founder Sridhar Vembu has been trying to pull off the unexpected for the last nine months. While his vision of making engineers work in rural regions, or “closer to their homes” was in the pipeline for years, the coronavirus pandemic only sped up Sridhar’s plans. At present, the SaaS company is experimenting with 10 villages in Tamil Nadu, where 200 of its engineers – 20 in each village – will collaborate and build software for the world. These feeder offices are situated 20-30 kilometres away from their hometowns.

It’s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn’t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos’s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs.

That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best Buy, which was still in expansion mode at the time, with sales growing 17 percent annually. Toys ‘R’ Us sued Amazon in a high-profile battle, alleging it had violated an agreement the two companies had for the toy store chain to be an exclusive seller on Amazon.com.

And during the holiday season, Amazon’s website suffered repeated outages, drawing the wrath of customers and the press alike.

Houseparty, the video chat app that’s seen a surge of growth during quarantine, is preparing to expand its service in a new direction: co-watching live video with friends. The company on Friday will launch its first experiential event series called In the House, which will feature more than 40 celebrities who will dance, talk, cook, sing, workout and more, over the course of three days.
Viewers of the event will be able to sing and dance with Alicia Keys and DaBaby; cook with Bad Bunny, José Andrés and Christina Tosi; work out with Cam Newton and Terry Crews; and dance with Derek Hough and Addison Rae, for example.