The company is also facing its third lawsuit for alleged anti-competitive practices and bitcoin topped $ 20,000 for the first time.
This week, the news agenda in the technological world was carried out by Google, which presented failures in its service on Monday and left millions of users in suspense for about an hour. Eyes were also focused on Bitcoin, which soared in value twice, and Sony, which withdrew the Cyberpunk 2077 video game from the PlayStation Store due to anomalies. Learn what shouldn’t have been missed in the last few days.
“Google Down”
Last Monday, a rare technical error caused several Google services such as Gmail, YouTube, and Drive to go down globally for 47 minutes. In that time, millions of users reported problems watching videos, uploading new emails, or syncing files with the #GoogleDown tag.
As the company explained days later, the blackout was due to an error with its system to identify people online. In October, the company began moving verification tools to a new storage system, misreporting parts of the data in the process, potentially causing the crash.
About 15% of requests sent to Google’s cloud storage service were interrupted during Monday’s blackout, the company said.
Bitcoin surpasses its all-time high
Bitcoin, the world’s most widely used cryptocurrency, surpassed its all-time high twice this week. The first time was on Wednesday, when it first hit $ 20,000, taking advantage of the markets’ appetite for risk. The next day, he smashed his record and reached $ 23,712.
Since the beginning of the year, bitcoin has risen close to 190%, driven by interest from traditional investors who were previously suspicious of this cryptocurrency.
However, the price really started to skyrocket at the end of October due to the launch of a cryptocurrency purchase, sale, and payment service from the payment giant Paypal. Since then, this cryptocurrency has gained more than 40%.
Huawei opens its search engine to Android mobiles
On Thursday, the technology giant Huawei enabled its new search engine to all mobile devices with the Android operating system. The tool, which goes by the name Petal Search, aims to compete directly with Google, even more so when the US veto on the Chinese company forced Google to break commercial relations with Huawei and is the reason why its mobile devices do not make up the ecosystem of the American giant.
The new search engine was launched a few months ago by Huawei and includes more than twenty categories, such as flights, hotels, weather, sports, events, series, news, and movies, among others.
At the moment, the application cannot be downloaded on iOS devices, although computers with this operating system will be able to access it from the browser.
Sony retira Cyberpunk 2077 de PlayStation Store
Sony was in the eye of the hurricane this Friday after it removed the Cyberpunk 2077 video game from its online platform PlayStation Store worldwide less than ten days after launching it.
The game, one of the most mediated of the year, was blamed for technical failures, particularly in its console versions. The Polish studio CD Projekt RED, creator of the project, apologized on Monday and promised to “resolve the anomalies” through corrections announced for January and February in order to “improve the experience” of the game and proposed to reimburse players who do not want to wait.
“SIE [Sony Interactive Entertainment] strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction and therefore we are going to start offering refunds” to gamers, Sony said.
Google sued for alleged monopoly practices
Attorneys general from 38 states and US territories filed a lawsuit against Google on Thursday for alleged anti-competitive practices.
The plaintiffs allege that the company illegally maintains its monopoly power over search engines and online advertising marketplaces. Google would have used exclusivity agreements to dominate new technologies such as speakers, televisions, and smart cars.
In October, the Justice Department, along with 11 states, sued Google for maintaining a dominant position in the same businesses. It would be looking for the most recent lawsuit to be consolidated into a single one along with that of the Department of Justice.
Google is not the only company that has been in the sights of regulators, on December 9 it became known that the Federal Trade Commission of the United States (FTC, for its acronym in English) and prosecutors representing 48 states and territories The country filed a lawsuit against Facebook alleging that this company abused its dominant position to neutralize the competition.