Reddit was down for several hours yesterday due to an “internal systems issue”. While the mobile version of the site fluctuated between being semi usable to being completed down, the desktop version was unusable for nearly five hours.

Outages like this that occur to major website are a newsworthy event, as users flock to social media to report the outage and speculate on the cause.

In 2023 it feels like the cost of everything is skyrocketing, from eggs being $10 for a dozen, to the price of a used car being up 61% compared to 2019.

Consumers and business owners alike are scrambling to cut costs where they can, and as a business owner you may be tempted to target your technology spending.

Having an employee quit can be very disruptive to your business, besides having to scramble to rehire for the role or find coverage within your organization you also have to tie up any loose ends they may have been working on (especially if they left without a hand off period).

Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to wait until the dust has settled, when it comes to tying up loose ends we recommend jumping into action immediately once you’ve been made aware that your employee will not be continuing in their role.

While Microsoft has been somewhat hush hush on the exact amount of their investment into the creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI (with some estimates nearing $10 billion).  It is clear that they’re going all in on AI and looking towards the future by already integrating it into their search engine Bing, via a new chat bot feature.

We’ve posted a lot of articles on how to avoid a data breach (here are a couple of recent ones for you to review if one hasn’t happened to you so far and you’d like to keep it that way).

Unfortunately, we fear that if you’ve reached this article you may be part of the growing number of business owners whose data has been breached (in 2020 there were 700,000 attacks on small businesses with damages exceeding $2.8 Billion).

Data breach severity varies widely, from an employee email being temporarily hacked all the way to having your backups infiltrated and locked for a ransom – and even if you pay the ransom you still might not recover your data.

Downloading applications from trustworthy sources is something that has been drilled into most of us as internet safety 101, and many of us would consider the top link on Google to be a trustworthy source.

However, hackers are now taking advantage of that and pushing ads that contain their malware disguised as legitimate applications.

As a technology service provider, it’s probably a given that we believe in proactive maintenance. We believe being proactive is less costly both in lost revenue and lost time (and time is money so it’s doubling down when a technology outage occurs).

Many clients are afraid to replace aging hardware, these systems represent a big investment for them typically and they want to get the most “bang for their buck” out of systems they spent thousands of dollars on.

If you’ve realized you need additional IT support for your business but are on the fence about which route to take, hiring IT staff or outsourcing your needs to an IT service provider the choice can be difficult.

Many of our clients reach us because they have been using an unreliable IT support service, their existing IT staff left, or sometimes because they’ve somehow gotten by with no IT at all but realize that needs to change.

It was announced this week that Microsoft will be laying off 10,000 employees in a bid to cut costs in response to “macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities”.

They join the likes of Amazon who also recently laid off 18,000 employees and Meta who cut 11,000 jobs last November.

ChatGPT is a power AI chatbot that allows the user to communicate a question to it and receive a very thorough answer on any topic the user can dream up. Created by OpenAI and already fielding massive investment offers even from companies like Microsoft, they’ve had a ton of buzz in the news both positive and negative.