Tech news of the week: Microsoft global outage, e-commerce sales, and more | Technology News

What can be considered the biggest IT outage of this year clearly shows what happens when companies depend on one service provider, and how a single line of bad code could turn the world around us upside down. Industries like airlines, banks, ATMs, hospitals, and more were severely impacted, with some airlines even ending up issuing handwritten boarding passes. The IT outage is said to have hurt many businesses, leading to billions of dollars in loss, and disruption of various services.

CrowdStrike admitted that the issue was caused due to a release of a sensor configuration update to Windows systems, which triggered a logic error, resulting in a system crash.

Amazon and Flipkart – the two major e-commerce platforms in India are currently running a sale on a range of products. While Amazon’s sale is limited to Prime customers, the Flipkart GOAT sale is open to everyone, offering deals and discounts on smartphones, laptops, accessories, smart TVs, and more.

OpenAI introduced a new language model GPT-4o mini, a cost-effective generative AI model that outperforms GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo. According to the company, it costs $0.24 per 1 million tokens and also outperforms many of the existing models such as Gemini Flash, and Claude Haiku.

OnePlus introduced its first metal smartphone with 5G connectivity – OnePlus Nord 4 (review) – along with other products like the Nord Buds 3 Pro, Watch 2R, and the OnePlus Pad 2 at a launch event held in Milan, Italy. The Nord 4 is also the first phone from the company with six years of promised software support along with four major Android OS upgrades.