When the cloud backup fails
Google Cloud's London outage, locked chats in ChatGPT, a local AI workflow from n8n and Anthropic's proposed public benefit fund.
Google Cloud's London outage exposed a detail worth taking into an operations meeting: the backup generators failed to take over. This edition also looks at two ways to control access to AI tools and a proposal to earmark shares for public benefit.
Google Cloud's London outage
Google's preliminary report put the 20 October disruption at six hours and ten minutes. A power interruption hit a London data centre and a fault in the backup controls prevented its generators from taking the load. Reuters reported that Revolut's disruption was linked to the incident, citing a person familiar with it. Google Cloud's incident report · Reuters via Euronext
Why it matters. For payments, email or accounting, check whether the fallback depends on the same provider and when the team last tested it.
ChatGPT rolls out locked chats
A PIN, or device authentication on supported phones, keeps selected chats out of regular history and search. Locking leaves retention and training settings as they were and adds no end-to-end encryption. Resetting a forgotten PIN permanently deletes the locked chats. OpenAI's help page
Why it matters. A lock helps when sharing a screen or device. Review the separate data settings if you're deciding what can be stored or used for training.
n8n runs AI workflows locally
An n8n guide showed how to run open models on one NVIDIA DGX Spark without calling cloud AI APIs. In the author's invoice example, the model got the totals and line items right but missed a zero in the VAT number. n8n's guide
Why it matters. Local processing gives you more control over where the data goes. An invoice still needs its identifiers checked.
Anthropic proposes a public benefit fund
Anthropic announced a plan to commit 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund, subject to shareholder approval. Details on how the fund would operate were still to come at the time. Anthropic's announcement
Why it matters. A share pledge could grow in value with the company. How that value gets used depends on who controls the fund and how they decide what to support.
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