In the News – June 2019

TICKETS TO HARRY POTTER PLAY IMMEDIATELY CRASH SF THEATER WEBSITE

Petrificus Totalus! Potterheads were quite frustrated when visiting San Francisco’s Curran Theater’s website early in the morning on March 12th. Their website experienced technical difficulties and crashed due to an overwhelming flood of fans trying to score tickets to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” The situation was broadcasted on Twitter and Potterheads took to social media to respond.

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TARGET EXPERIENCES A WEEKEND OF TECHNOLOGICAL TROUBLES

Over the weekend of June 15th and 16th, Target faced a series of technical issues. First, the cash registers quit working. Target blamed an “internal technology issue,” leaving some customers waiting in long lines and other abandoning their carts altogether. This specific issue lasted a few hours on June 15—but the problems didn’t stop there. The following day, Target was not able to process select card payments for upwards of 90 minutes. This issue was not internal, though, with Target citing their payment vendor experiencing issues in one of its data centers.

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UBER EXPECTS A LONG WAIT BEFORE SELF-DRIVING CARS DOMINATE

It’s clear to Uber that self-driving cars at scale isn’t something that’s going to happen tomorrow. In this article, Raquel Urtasun, Chief Scientist at Uber Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) and head of the group’s unit in Toronto, speaks about the challenges for self-driving development at a Reuters Newsmakers event in New York. It seems that Uber, along with the rest of the self-driving industry, underestimated the difficulty of building cars that could predict human behavior and respond appropriately. Uber approached other partners to tackle the autonomous vehicle as a team to make their big investment develop into a reality sooner rather than later.

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