A Google Cloud failure in London disrupted banks and other services across Britain, and a judge kept a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a bug in custody. Steam players protest at AI-made demos, Apple prepares a 28 October event and Sony revives the Walkman.
Google Cloud failure in London disrupts banks and online services across Britain
A failure in one of Google Cloud’s three London availability zones disrupted services across Britain on Tuesday morning, hitting banks, retailers and delivery firms. Google said multiple services in its europe-west2 region were suffering elevated errors and intermittent network failures from 06:08 UTC, affecting products including Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine. The company apologised, said its engineers were investigating and at first offered neither a workaround nor an estimated time of recovery.
Outage-tracking reports listed problems at Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT and Screwfix, among others. Revolut said a disruption had affected several services, including card payments, transfers and cash withdrawals, but insisted that its customers’ money and data were safe. Lloyds said its app was working normally but acknowledged that some customers had trouble with online services. Google later advised affected customers to move their workloads to another location where feasible.
Google launched its first cloud service, App Engine, in April 2008, and Google Cloud now reports annual revenue of about $58.7 billion, competing with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Its infrastructure is divided into regions, each an independent geographic area that usually contains three zones intended to act as separate failure domains. Services built to run in a single zone, rather than across several, can be knocked out when that zone fails, as some engineers pointed out online on Tuesday.
Judge keeps former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a meeting room in custody
A US judge has ordered Abdulrahman Alfozan, a former OpenAI engineer accused of hiding a recording device in a company conference room, to remain in custody until his trial. Judge Alex Tse ruled in San Francisco on Monday that there was a significant risk the 35-year-old Saudi national would not appear in court, after prosecutors argued that he enjoyed considerable backing from the Saudi government, including an offer from its consulate to help fund his bail.
OpenAI found the device, plugged into the back of a television and wrapped in toilet paper, on 30 September, and the FBI arrested Alfozan on 9 October. Prosecutors said he had been in frequent contact with a member of the Saudi royal family, and that executives had met government officials in the room. His lawyer, William Pernik, called the flight-risk concerns baseless and said there was no evidence of spying. If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison.
OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in December 2015, became one of the world’s most valuable technology companies after launching ChatGPT in November 2022, a release that accelerated the boom in generative AI. It closed a funding round in March 2026 at a post-money valuation of $852 billion and employs about 4,500 people. Alfozan, a US permanent resident, had worked there for about a year and had earlier worked for a Saudi venture capital firm, according to court filings.
Steam Next Fest players complain of a flood of AI-made game demos
Players have complained that the October edition of Steam Next Fest, Valve’s festival of free game demos, is crowded with games made or promoted with generative AI. The event opened on 19 October with 8,202 playable demos, more than twice as many as last year, according to Valve. A post in the r/Steam community on Reddit declaring the festival ruined by AI gathered more than 8,800 upvotes, with users objecting to AI-generated thumbnails that did not show the actual games.
Another user asked Valve for a way to filter games with AI-generated content out of the Discovery Queue, noting that developers must already disclose such use. The store offers no AI tag that could power such a filter, and Valve cut back its user-defined tags in May, though an open-source browser extension now flags such games. By one count, about 17 per cent of demos at the June festival disclosed AI use. Elsewhere, Epic Games has reportedly delayed a Star Wars shooter to pursue an AI-first approach.
Valve launched Steam in 2003, and by 2021 the store offered more than 34,000 games and had more than 132 million monthly active users. Next Fest is held more than once a year, with a previous edition in June, to let players try upcoming titles before release. Valve requires developers to state on store pages whether their games use pre-generated AI assets or generate content live, a rule meant to ensure disclosure and limit copyright risks, amid fears that cheap AI clones could crowd out other games.
Apple sets a 28 October ‘Pro and Tell’ event, with a touchscreen MacBook Pro expected
Apple will hold a hardware event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, 28 October, at 10am Pacific time, under the tagline “Pro and Tell”, its second major product presentation this month. Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice-president of marketing, shared a short teaser video on 19 October, saying he could not wait for the event. Apple has not confirmed which products it will show, but the name points to a refresh of its MacBook Pro laptops.
Mark Gurman, a journalist who follows Apple closely, expects the company’s first MacBook Pro models with touchscreens and OLED displays, in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, with a Dynamic Island and lighter bodies. He also expects a 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac with M6 chips, and an iPad mini with an OLED screen. The event is expected to be a hands-on session for journalists rather than a traditional keynote. Apple shares closed at $342.94 on Monday.
Apple introduced the MacBook Pro in 2006 as the high-end model of its laptop range and used Intel processors until it began switching to its own Apple silicon chips in 2020. A version with a touch-sensitive strip above the keyboard, the Touch Bar, arrived in October 2016. A touchscreen Mac would reverse Apple’s long-standing approach of keeping laptops and tablets apart, and the event follows the launch of the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, whose pre-orders sold out within minutes.
Sony revives the Walkman with three premium music players costing up to $5,899
Sony has unveiled three high-end Walkman digital music players, led by the $5,899.99 NW-WM1ZM3, which has a gold-plated body made of oxygen-free copper. The range also includes the NW-WM1AM3 at $2,999.99 and the more compact NW-ZX900 at $1,899.99. All three run Android 16, connect to streaming services over Wi-Fi and support high-resolution formats, and they are available to pre-order now, with deliveries due to begin in January.
The flagship has a 5.5-inch touchscreen, 256GB of storage, braided Kimber Kable wiring and gold-plated screws that Sony says improve grounding and sound. The NW-ZX900 has a five-inch screen and 64GB of memory, while the middle model offers 128GB. Sony claims battery life of up to about 35 hours with streaming apps and promises a wider soundstage and richer bass, although some reviewers questioned its audiophile claims, noting that the players also offer Bluetooth.
Sony launched the Walkman on 1 July 1979 as a portable cassette player, helping the compact cassette overtake vinyl record sales in 1983. It sold about 220 million cassette models before ending their production in 2010, and by then cumulative sales across all Walkman formats, including CD players, had reached about 400 million units. The brand lives on in digital players such as these, which can even show an animated cassette as a screensaver.