The Morning After: the Facebook outage of October 4 explained

We’ll see why Facebook saw all of its activity collapse on Monday, but first: e-readers.

It’s a category of devices that we don’t see much development in – probably because it’s really a device for reading text and not much else. Amazon’s Kindle, thanks to its powerful online e-book store, usually has the category sewn up, with several e-reader options ranging from luxury to slates sometimes at $ 60.

But I like an underdog – and most things with an e-ink screen. Like and.

So I have time for Kobo’s new $ 260 Sage eReader, which lets you add handwritten notes with a stylus. It has an 8 inch 1440 x 1920 e-ink screen that adjusts brightness and color according to the time of day. You can also convert your handwritten e-notes made on e-books and PDF files to plain text and send them to other devices – a feature already offered by Kobo on its larger and more expensive $ 399.

If you’re looking for an e-reader that doesn’t have Amazon hooks – or if you need to take notes on your e-books – you can pre-order the Sage now. It starts shipping on October 19.

– Mat Smith

It should have been routine maintenance.

Following the massive service outage that cut all of its services, Facebook posted a blog post detailing what happened. According to Santosh Janardhan, the company’s vice president of infrastructure, the outage started with what should have been routine maintenance.

An order was issued that was supposed to assess the availability of the backbone network that links all of Facebook’s disparate IT facilities. Instead, the order unintentionally deleted all of those connections. Things got worse because the outage made it impossible for Facebook engineers to connect to the servers they needed to fix.

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It responds to many of our previous complaints, but this award …

The Surface Pro 8 solves many of the issues we encountered with the Pro 7, including a great premium design. Editor-in-chief Dana Wollman put the hybrid device to the test, and she especially liked the 120Hz display.

But the starting price ($ 1,100) is higher than its predecessor – still without a keyboard. This makes it harder to justify choosing the Surface Pro 8 over a comparably priced laptop. Especially in an age when there are so many great options to choose from.

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A better Surface Book, a missed opportunity

Oh, we’re not done. Microsoft’s Laptop Studio was also under review. Devindra Hardawar has tested it and he thinks the Surface Laptop Studio is a solid successor to the Surface Book. While it’s faster than the Book 3 and has a beautiful and flexible display, it is strangely lacking in CPU power compared to the competition. He explains everything in his full review.

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But in the form of a streaming cloud.

The three main Kingdom Hearts games are coming to Nintendo Switch. You will be able to play Kingdom Hearts – HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMix, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue and . These are all cloud streaming games on Switch, so you will need a good internet connection to play them. The news came in the wake of the announcement that Kingdom Hearts the protagonist, Sora, will be the last character to join Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Sora means “sky” in Japanese, so there is a certain irony in the game series being released from the cloud.

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Find out all about the company’s latest flagship phones.

The company plans to reveal everything there is to know about the Pixel 6 lineup on October 19 at 1 p.m. ET. Months ago, the company leaked information about the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, including what the phones look like. In August, Google said that Tensor, the first system-on-a-chip it designed, will be among the new additions to the Pixel series.

Expect substantial camera improvements, with the Pixel 6 Pro getting 4x optical zoom and an additional telephoto option. In comparison, Apple’s iPhone 13 Pro achieves 3x optical zoom.

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