The Internet is both timeless and timely in an interesting way. While what's popular changes seemingly instantly, and what we're capable of doing on it continues to grow exponentially. Ultimately, the Internet is the digital town square of a global village, where all types and professions gather.
In 2011, I first wrote about what happens in 60 seconds on the Internet.
I've since updated the article a few times.
Each time I write the article, I'm in awe at the amount of data we create and how much it has grown. For example, looking back to 2011, I was amazed that users created 600+ new videos and 60 new blog posts each minute. Those numbers seem quaint today.
via DOMO
Shortly after I started sharing the articles, Data Never Sleeps started standardizing the data, which is helpful.
Today, the Internet reaches 5.4 billion people. Most of them also use social media.
To add some more perspective,
- In 2008, 1.4 billion people were online; in 2015, we were at 3 billion. Now, that number has almost doubled again.
- In 2008, Facebook only had 80 million users, and Twitter (now X) had 2 million users.
- In 2008, there were 250 million smartphones, and now there are almost 7 billion of them!
It is mind-blowing to consider what happens each minute on the Internet today. For example, the 104,000 hours spent on Zoom represents a significant societal shift ... and the over 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube highlights the incredible amount of content that's being created to share.
In 2023, the world created approximately 120 zettabytes of data ... which breaks down to approximately 337,000 petabytes of data a day. Broken down even further, it calculates to more than 15 Terabytes of new data created per person.
The calculations about what happens in an Internet minute will change rapidly again because of AI. Consider the amount of computing power and data it takes to power all of these new GPTs. Now, imagine the amount of new data that AI is creating. Then, try to imagine the challenge we'll have figuring out what's real, what's made up, and what is simply wrong or intentionally misleading.
In addition, as more devices and digital WHOs start creating and sharing data, it's hard to fathom the ramifications and sheer increase in data.
I'm curious about what the next five years have in store for us as we approach the 40th anniversary of the World Wide Web.
Lessons From The CrowdStrike Outage ...
Perplexity is an AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. I've been quite impressed with it. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend checking it out.
Click here to see the whole perplexity.ai response.
The scope of the outage was surprising.
United, American, and Delta all called complete ground stops. Microsoft was hit. Public displays around the world showed the blue screen of death.
All because CrowdStrike pushed a global update. That patch caused every computer with CrowdStrike to crash. Even worse, these computers can only be fixed in person by an IT professional. Because it involves a Blue Screen of Death, IT can't just remote in to fix it.
It's probably the largest outage in history and has caused untold damage. It affected emergency services in some states and countries.
Even after a patch is issued, it may take days for things to return to normal, as each endpoint requires individual attention, and some systems might have suffered complete failures.
via XKCD
It's a healthy reminder that our 'robust' infrastructure isn't always so robust ... and that tech consolidation and concentration can have consequences.
While there are a seemingly infinite number of tech companies now, the infrastructure has consolidated into the hands of very few. We need to think about our digital resilience, not just in the systems we run, but in the globally connected systems and in the growing Internet of Things.
Does your business have all of its eggs in one basket? Does it have failsafes in case of an emergency?
As I observe the growing adoption of AI, I notice that people tend to emphasize its capabilities over its potential failures. In our increasingly interconnected and automated world, ensuring business continuity is more crucial than ever.
Posted at 11:48 AM in Admin, Business, Current Affairs, Gadgets, Market Commentary, Trading, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
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