Internet Outages, Privacy Fines Highlight Troubled Month Online
Recent widespread internet outages expose critical infrastructure flaws, while British Airways faces a record GDPR fine and ICE faces scrutiny over facial recognition use. Major tech platforms also find themselves excluded from an upcoming White House social media summit.
The internet experiences a remarkably rough month as multiple major outages disrupt millions of users globally, preventing sites from loading and halting email services. These persistent failures highlight the urgent need for internet providers to improve their routing filters and underscore the risks of deploying new code directly onto live production systems.
In a massive win for digital privacy enforcement, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office fines British Airways a record £183 million over a GDPR breach that exposes the data of 500,000 users. Meanwhile, news breaks that ICE and the FBI routinely mine state driver's license photos for facial recognition without warrants, using the technology to track not just suspects but also innocent bystanders.
The White House prepares to host a social media summit this week, but notably excludes industry giants Facebook and Twitter from the guest list. In other business news, employee development startup 15Five raises $30.7 million to expand its performance evaluation toolkit, and new analysis explores how RegTech startups navigate the unique security and sales challenges of the financial services sector.