Team News

Microsoft’s cloud service has been hit by yet another outage, weeks after an IT failure at the company’s services “stopped the world”.

In a post on X, Cambridge Water said some of its services were down this afternoon.

“Due to worldwide issues with Microsoft Azure, an issue with our website is affecting several services, including MyAccount and PayNow,” the water company said.

Microsoft said it is investigating reports of user problems, saying: “We are investigating reports of problems related to Microsoft services globally.

The company later announced that it had implemented a fix that appeared to resolve the issue, saying there was “improvement in service availability” and that it was “continuing to monitor to ensure full recovery.”

However, the service status website still showed global problems. Thousands of problems were reported by users on DownDetector, a website that monitors problems with IT services.

The incident comes less than two weeks after a major IT outage hit global infrastructure, including transportation and offline healthcare services, because a botched software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike affected Microsoft devices.

With thousands of flights canceled globally, US airline Delta is reportedly planning to seek compensation from both Crowdstrike and Microsoft.

If you’re one of the two billion WhatsApp users, you’ll soon be able to talk to other people in different languages.

That’s because WhatsApp, perhaps the most popular messaging app in the world, could soon get a lot smarter and allow users to use the Live Translate feature.

In short, Live Translate is what you think it is: the feature “listens” to what the speaker is saying and almost instantly translates it into a language you can understand.

The goal is for you, let’s say, an English speaker, to be able to communicate with your friend from Korea without either of you knowing any language other than your native language, writes foreign media, Telegraph reports.

Galaxy AI will power WhatsApp real-time translation

— ICE UNIVERSE (@UniverseIce) July 6, 2024

Normally, you may face challenges in understanding and responding to each other.

This is where Live Translate comes in. Using advanced AI technology, it can translate spoken or written language almost instantly.

It is reported that Samsung’s Live Translate feature supports a total of 16 languages.

In April, the three new additions were: Arabic, Indonesian, and Russian.

They join Chinese, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese.

The risk of collapse for generative artificial intelligence remains ever-present. The very contents they generate can “suffocate” them. The materials they contain are able to seriously “contaminate” the database used to train them.

The study led by Ilia Shumailov, of the University of Oxford and published in the journal “Nature”, raises the problem of a dangerous spiral effect, where AI teaches us new information using the content it produces itself in a vicious circle.

“It is a study that verifies in fact, in a very precise way, the old concerns, that is, that have existed since the birth of generative models”, emphasizes Viviana Patti, computer science expert at the University of Turin.

Generative AI is now more and more widespread, starting with ChatGpt, a dozen other very popular models have arrived quickly, capable of producing all kinds of content in just a few moments, from texts to photos and videos with the internet that is rapidly being populated with content created precisely by algorithms.

Until a few years ago, the Internet could be considered a “cauldron” of content of all kinds, reliable and otherwise, but all characterized by a common element: they were produced by human beings.

Now this is no longer the case and may be less and less, causing a change that can lead to a significant problem.

In fact, AIs learn based on the materials, texts or photos, that are made available to them and on which they are trained, and until now these were generally human-produced content, for example Wikipedia pages or groups animal photos, but now that the internet is being populated with AI-generated content, it could change the quality of what AI itself learns.