Data Center News Roundup: Dropbox Layoffs, Google Outage

With data center news moving faster than ever, we want to make it easy for data center professionals to cut through the noise and find the most important stories of the week.

The Data Center Knowledge News Roundup brings you the latest news and developments across the data center industry — from investments and mergers to security threats and industry trends.

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AT&T Teams Up With BlackRock Alternatives

AT&T has announced plans to expand its Hyper-Gig Fiber services nationwide through a joint venture with BlackRock Alternatives. As a result of this partnership, AT&T hopes to reach 30 million fiber subscribers by 2025 and better compete against cable providers, regional fiber providers, and T-Mobile US and Verizon’s FWA services.

Security Failures at TikTok Data Centers

Amid concern among lawmakers over TikTok’s questionable handling of user data, a Forbes report found significant security failures at the social media company’s Virginia data centers.

According to documents, photos, and employee interviews, security vulnerabilities include unmarked flash drives plugged into servers, unescorted visitors wandering the halls, boxes of hard drives left unattended, constant door alarms, and illicit cryptocurrency mining. Yikes!

Google Cloud’s Rainy Day in Paris: Fire, Flood, and Outage

On Wednesday, Google Cloud faced a series of unfortunate events in Paris, as a “water intrusion” incident (potentially linked to a fire at a Global Switch-operated data center) led to service disruptions in the europe-west9-a zone. At the same time, Google Cloud Networking and Load Balancing faced separate problems, impacting zones in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America for about 90 minutes.

Despite these mishaps, Google Cloud posted its first profitable quarter on record, with an operating income of $191 million on $7.4 billion in revenue.

More Tech Layoffs – What’s New

This week, Amazon began to implement yet another round of layoffs — this time in its AWS cloud division.

Dropbox, too, which operates its own data centers, has now joined the layoff train. On Thursday, CEO Drew Houston announced a 16% cut (approximately 500 people) to its workforce “to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era.”

While not, by any means, unusual, it’s disheartening to witness the ease with which CEOs continue to discard employees who no longer serve an immediate capital purpose.

Data Center World 2023: Get Ready With Keynote Interviews

In preparation for DCW 2023 in Austin, Texas, the DCK team interviewed some of this year’s most-anticipated keynote speakers, including:

After reading these interviews, don’t forget to add the keynotes to your (likely busy!) conference schedule. We’ll see you there!

Other Great Data Center Reads (and a Video) on DCK This Week

Traditional vs. Hyperscale Data Centers: What's the Difference? What is a hyperscale data center? In this feature, Christopher Tozzi tackles the complicated questions surrounding how we define hyperscalers.

Bare-Metal Cloud Servers vs. Bare Metal in a Private Data Center. Choosing between bare-metal servers in the public cloud and bare-metal servers in a private data center? Make an informed decision on the best solution for your workload with this in-depth explainer.

Rules, Questions, and Exercises for Future Data Centers. Finally, in this Data Center World 2022 video recap, futurist Ben Hammersley details rules, questions, and thought exercises to help us envision the data centers of the future.

That’s all for this week. Which of these stories is most important to you? Let us know in the comments below!