Daily Cuppa: outages ahoy

Thank goodness it's Friday. Buckle down so we can tell you what happened last night.

You'll need that safety belt, because it was all about outages. The night started with Amazon Web Services (AWS) falling over in Western Europe. The Royal Bank of Scotland also saw technical difficulties on top of the balance glitch that it had last month.

But it kept on going. Next in line was Google Talk; those who tried to use the service were plagued by error messages and downtime.

Twitter also had an up/down kind of night. The company finally explained that two of its systems had failed in parallel, making the company's redundancy, well, redundant.

Alcatel-Lucent's results were less than stellar, and the company is set to lay off 5000 jobs. Nokia is also axing jobs — the company is letting R&D workers go in China.

Facebook also announced results, making a loss and sending shares plummeting.

It's also reportedly offering a bug bounty to anyone who can find problems in its internal systems.

Amazon's second-quarter results, meanwhile, were a bit of a mixed bag.

A judge revealed that Samsung deleted evidence, if inadvertently, for its trial with Apple over patent infringement.

In other Apple news, the Mac trojan reported earlier in the week apparently spies on your browsing and instant-messaging habits.

At the Olympics, it seems that Wi-Fi hotspots are not allowed at sporting venues. Why or how the organisers plan to enforce this ban is anyone's guess.

And from the "what the?" files, the Czech Republic team at the Olympics has a double-decker bus that does push-ups.