Tech briefsSix stories from roughly the last day. Summaries only; follow the links for the full reporting.
Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region in London went down early Tuesday, and Google’s status page blamed a “power event.” Dozens of services were affected, and the outage disrupted Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Royal Mail, among others, according to Downdetector reports cited by AP and RTÉ. Google says the event was mitigated and has since closed the incident after about 7 hours and 52 minutes.
Reuters reports that a Chinese-speaking hacker ran AI agents on an open-source platform called Cairn to attack more than 1,200 websites and breach over 100 of them, with victims including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. NorForge researcher Snorre Fagerland found the campaign through exposed Cairn control panels. The agents did much of the work with little human help, and successful hacks took about 23 hours and roughly $50 in AI tokens each.
The Department of Homeland Security ordered civilian federal agencies to remove DeepSeek products, including third-party products built on DeepSeek’s models, and barred future purchases. The order uses a 2018 supply-chain security law, and DHS says the models “present multiple threat vectors,” including possible transfer of sensitive data to China. Defense and national security systems fall under other authorities and are outside this order.
Reuters reports that OpenAI is trying to lock in a roughly $30 billion funding round that could value it at more than $1.4 trillion, with SoftBank and MGX said to be in talks. The push comes ahead of Anthropic’s expected mid-November listing, as both labs court the same pool of investors. Separately, Bloomberg reports Nscale is discussing a second $45 billion compute deal with Anthropic; those talks aren’t final.
Meta’s engineering team detailed Prometheus in New Albany, Ohio. The first phase, hundreds of thousands of GPUs across connected buildings, is finished and was used to train Meta’s Muse models, and the cluster is headed toward about a million GPUs at full scale. Meta says training runs keep over 85% useful-work time for pre-training and over 90% for reinforcement learning.
Apple sent invitations for a Los Angeles event on Wednesday, October 28, at 10 a.m. Pacific. The invite doesn’t name products, but reports expect new Macs, including touchscreen MacBook Pros, and possibly a new iPad mini.