By Bob Gaydos

   Those of us living through the tremendous advances of the computer age have been blessed with once unimaginable connection and convenience. We can connect with anyone anywhere on the planet at any time with a tap on the phone in our pocket. That sweater you absolutely need for the company party will be on your doorstep before dawn tomorrow morning. Amazing.

    But just as we are beneficiaries of our technical revolution, so are we hostage to it when malfunctions occur. Sometimes in a big time way. There have been a couple of major malfunctions affecting two of the leaders in our high tech world this week.

    Thursday afternoon, Microsoft reported a global, as in worldwide, outage of Microsoft 365 services, which left millions of people, institutions and businesses around the world without access to email and other functions. Microsoft says it has more than 450 million commercial Microsoft 365 customers. In addition to personal emails, the outage affected businesses, court proceedings, police reporting and government services. Affected were the United Kingdom Health Service and various departments of the United States government. Some security tools and AI functions were also affected. Microsoft was still working on restoring the services as this was being written Friday afternoon, obviously without the help of Microsoft.

      Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack. The company stated that a process responsible for establishing secure connections overwhelmed a cluster of servers, causing them to fail automated health checks and drop offline. That sudden drop shifted heavy traffic onto remaining servers, creating a cascading overload.

      Yes, that explanation was provided to me by AI. As I understand it, one function overwhelmed other functions causing all of them to malfunction or just plain stop. Which, on some level I understand. Heck, sometimes I have to shut down my phone and start it up again to get rid of whatever nonsense was annoying me because I couldn’t write my column or order some more B12. It’s annoying. Especially when five continents are affected.

     The other Big Tech malfunction was more prosaic, but possibly more impactful. It seems that AI guru and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had three serious zipper malfunctions, two with women who worked for him at Nvidia and one with a woman who is suspected of being a Chinese spy. Yes, he’s married and no, hobnobbing with the president of the United States while also canoodling with a woman suspected of being an operative of the Chinese government is not particularly intelligent, artificial or otherwise.

    Wuang was forced to resign as CEO after the board initiated an investigation of his affairs. The price of Nvidia dropped sharply in the stock market. Members of the Trump cabinet started pointing fingers at each other as to who was to blame for not knowing of this potentially serious security threat. 

     Actually, we did know. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had provided Trump with a report stating that Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang (wow what a convenient last name coincidence), who was an executive with a data firm based in Singapore. U.S. Intelligence officials said she was suspected as being a Chinese intelligence asset. A spy. The name of her firm is Megaspeed. Right out of James Bond.

    Trump apparently did what he usually does when given inconvenient news about a fellow billionaire who donates a lot of money to his causes. Nothing. Even when the malfunctions multiplied, Trump apparently was encouraging Wuang to fight to remain as boss of Nvidia. Alas, that was not to be and Jensen‘s supporters were left hoping he had a prenuptial agreement.

   Meanwhile, back in Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he and other administration officials had warned of the Megaspeed affair and had encouraged the Commerce Department, headed by Howard Lutnick, to sanction the Singapore firm. Bessent said the Treasury, Defense and State Departments and the U.S. trade representative wanted Megaspeed put on the trade black list as a possible shell company for the Chinese government to purchase advanced AI chips. But, Bessent said, Lutnick “has the pen.” 

    Don’t you like how these Trump guys turn on each other trying to stay on the good side of the boss? And boy wouldn’t you like to see a fight in the schoolyard between Bessent and Lutnick? Here, hold my pocket protector!

    At any rate, there will be investigations to determine what, if anything, China got out of this Wuang/Wuang extramarital affair. Nvidia will get a new boss. A lot of tech startups probably won’t get investment money from Jensen Wuang for a while.

    And I’m figuring that artificial intelligence will figure this whole mess out for us in about, oh 10 minutes. Depending on who’s holding the chips.

              ***

… hold it!

Just as this column is about to go to press, the FAA grounded all air traffic in the United States in what appeared to be a major outage affecting its air traffic control system.

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, confirmed the outage in a social media post, citing “a communication issue impacting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers.”

Like I said, hostage to our progress. Stay tuned.