Today, for the first time this season, the changing leaves caught my eye. As always, they are beautiful! It’s the perfect time of year to take walks, so here is a list of places to admire the foliage in Chicago.
The fall of Facebook, however, is less than admirable. Between outages and senate hearings, the social media giant drew a lot of attention in the news this week. Here you can get a good summary of the news that’s coming out. As expected, Facebook prioritizes profits over the protection of its users and now, its damage on societies worldwide has reached epic proportions. The information coming out is not new; here is an excellent documentary about social media from Netflix which was released last year. It is a must-watch for everyone.
When events like Facebook’s outage occur, they remind us that technology can fail, regardless of how reliable, consistent, and available it is on a day-to-day basis. The technology that runs your business consists of many moving parts: from your ISP such as Comcast to Microsoft’s mail servers, your tech is complex – it has to be! That is why it is so important to have a plan in place for when one of those moving parts breaks. Even Facebook with virtually unlimited funds, resources, and a massive technical team scrambled for 6 hours to get back up and running. Technology outages happen, and sometimes they take time to resolve. When it happens to you, keep calm and remember that you are in good hands. My team and I know how critical your technology is to your business and we’ll do our best to get you back up and running as soon as possible. Take advantage! Instead of waiting around while our team works, maybe take some time go for a walk and enjoy the leaves.
With care,
– Burak Sarac, Team Lead
The Worst Facebook Outage Since 2019
Last Monday, Facebook’s entire network of services suddenly went offline. The outage started just before 1PM CST, took nearly six hours to fix, and effectively took down all the company’s applications. This included Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Oculus, and even the company’s internal communication systems. Luckily for users, this outage was not the result of a hack or any other malicious activity. Unfortunately for Facebook, the outage seems to have been a result of a major internal mess up. Read this article to learn more.
World Mental Health Day
World Mental Health Day is on October 10th and as our understanding of mental health grows, we grow along with it. Mental health has come a long way since the early nineties when the World Federation of Mental Health (WFMH) officially established the day. For one, our language surrounding mental health has improved as words like “crazy”, “lunatic”, and the r-word are used less flippantly, and we’ve come to better understand how words can be unintentionally hurtful and stigmatizing. While we’ve learned a lot, there’s still so much more we can do to evolve as a society. Check out this article on how you can help destigmatize mental health.
Netflix Setting You Need to Know About
Love watching Netflix for hours on end? There’s a lot more you can do with it if you spend just a few quick minutes in the settings section. You can make your next binge watching weekend better by customizing subtitles, home screen previews, download settings, and more.
National Indigenous People’s Day
First proposed in 1977, Indigenous Peoples’ Day has grown rapidly in the last few years. More and more cities recognize the importance of a day that celebrates Native American cultures while acknowledging their resilience in the face of a long history of abuse and marginalization. But for Indigenous people, the holiday, which takes place the second Monday in October, simply acknowledges a battle they have always faced. As always, the first step towards being an ally is to educate yourself. Here is a great article to get started.
