Each week, Ben Hopkinson looks back at a serious, crazy, and happy news story from the past week.
Serious News
On Monday evening Facebook services went down. Although many people wouldn’t see this as serious news, many small businesses both locally and globally rely on Facebook to sell, advertise, and make money as well as sign into third party tools and sites with Facebook logins. The outage lasted for just under 7 hours, as the tech team scrambled to restore the services. A faulty configuration change to DNS and IP addresses caused the blackout which also affected Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – all owned by Facebook. After the downtime, Zuckerberg lost approximately $7billion, with shares for the social networking giant down 5%. Many people were thankful, while others felt lost that they couldn’t scroll on their timelines. I think this has made us all realise how much we rely on their services.
Crazy News
Wayne briefly spoke about this on Tuesday’s Breakfast, but a secondary school has banned pupils from using slang terms such as “like”, “bare” and “init” during work. This rule doesn’t affect playgrounds though, as they will of course be able to use these terms during break and lunch times. Lucy Frame, the principal of Ark All Saints Academy in Camberwell said the aim was to “help students understand the importance of expressing themselves clearly and accurately, not least through written language in examinations”. Init!
Happy News
Prime Minister Boris Johnson hopes that the UK’s Power Grid will be free of fossil fuels by 2035. Although a long 14 years away, this is the right step in combatting climate change and non-renewable energy. There is a second reason why this is being brought in however, as there is the ever-growing energy supply crunch that has sent prices spiralling in recent weeks. The government says the plan is “a landmark move to end Britain’s dependency on volatile fossil fuels”. The task at hand is huge, with 38% of electricity demand being met by gas as fuel. Nuclear is the next best option but are extremely pricey at £20billion per station. I guess time will tell if the government can make the target while meeting the demand by the public.
