They are two of the biggest names in technology and each is grappling with a huge and highly embarrassing debacle. On April 26th Amazon’s finance chief, Thomas Szkutak, said the firm was still trying to get to the bottom of a glitch that caused numerous websites it hosts for other businesses to crash or run painfully slowly during the previous week. The same day, Sony of Japan revealed that names, addresses, passwords and possibly credit-card details of 77m accounts were stolen when hackers gained access to the network it runs in 60 countries for its PlayStation online-gaming system, as well as for Qriocity, a service offering music, films and television shows.The two cases are different, but each has, in its own way, revived worries about the safety of storing and processing data over the internet — worries that have largely faded since the web’s early days, as countless individuals and companies have come to find that the benefits of doing things online greatly outweigh the risks. The two crises have also raised questions about the speed and quality of information provided by tech companies when confronted with systems failures.
http://www.economist.com/node/18620636?story_id=18620636
Online reputations in the dirt: Serious glitches at Sony and Amazon have revived worries about risks of handling data online
They are two of the biggest names in technology and each is grappling with a huge and highly embarrassing debacle. On April 26th Amazon’s finance chief, Thomas Szkutak, said the firm was still trying to get to the bottom of a glitch that caused numerous websites it hosts for other businesses to crash or run painfully slowly during the previous week. The same day, Sony of Japan revealed that names, addresses, passwords and possibly credit-card details of 77m accounts were stolen when hackers gained access to the network it runs in 60 countries for its PlayStation online-gaming system, as well as for Qriocity, a service offering music, films and television shows.