The worldwide Apple store is down, and it has been down for the past 3 hours, giving rise to speculations that new/refreshed products will soon be announced.

Apple, from time to time, takes down its websites for maintenance and user interface upgrades so it could all just be a false alarm. However, if Apple were to announce a new device right now, it would most probably be a new line of Macbook Pros. Other than that, it could officially release the Mac Pro, the device they said would be announced later this year.

The new Mac Pro will be at least doubly powerful on every count than its [...]

Online encyclopaedia Wikipedia was knocked offline on Monday thanks to two accidentally cut cables near a data centre in Florida.

The site, and various associated services, were inaccessible or extremely sluggish for over two hours beginning at around 1430 BST on Monday.

A status web page showed various parts of the Wikimedia network as suffering performance issues.

Wikipedia ruled out any suggestion of malicious intent being behind problem.

The two [...]

Google will be shuttering Apps for Teams, Google Listen, Google Video for Business and an unspecified number of its more than 150 blogs.

[quote]“Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue,” Google wrote in a blog post. “This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you.”[/quote]

Google says it’s made changes to around 50 products, features and services in the past year. By eliminating products, it says, it can better allocate its time to more popular products, which will [...]

The Google Talk IM and video chat service suffered a massive global outage beginning early on Thursday, leaving users mum for more than four hours. The service was restored around 8.25PM. 

The outage was first reported by users on Twitter, a social networking website. “Google talk being down is massively annoying! You don’t realise how much you take it for granted,” Pete Gould, a Twitter user said. 

Many Google Talk users reported that they could log into the service, saw their contacts with the respective status but failed to send messages to them. Some other users could not log in. The service is not only used by people to keep [...]

At the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian, UK, seawater is taken in and filtered before it is used to cool down the reactor cores. It is not unusual for these inlets to be clogged with debris from the ocean, mainly seaweed and jellyfish. But on the 28th of June, the power plant faced a highly unusual situation.

Clouds of jellyfish seemed to be pulled towards the plant and clogged its intake filters. This reduced the flow of cool seawater to the reactor cores. At first the plant engineers tried to reduce the load on the cores to reduce the amount of water required to cool them, but that was not sufficient and [...]