Bad Week for technology 9-30-20

Posted on
tokyo stock exchange down 9-30-20

Tokyo Stock Exchange to Resume Trading Friday After Outage

By Gearoid Reidy and Shoko Oda September 30, 2020, 7:51 PM EDT Updated on October 1, 2020, 6:43 AM EDT

The Tokyo Stock Exchange confirmed it will restart trading on Friday after an unprecedented all-day halt on Thursday which froze buying and selling of thousands of companies in the worst-ever outage in the world’s third-largest equity market.

All orders Thursday were canceled, and opening prices when trading resumes will be the closing prices on Wednesday, Japan Exchange Group Inc., the operator of the TSE, said earlier.

The problem occurred after a failed switchover to backups following a hardware breakdown. The exchange made the decision to call off trading for the entire day after conferring with market participants, who said it would be difficult to deal with their clients and carry out orders.

The halt dampened investor sentiment following a positive U.S. stock market performance overnight and closures in other major markets in the region, including China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan for public holidays.

It also came on the first day of a new quarter and of the second half of Japan’s fiscal year, when trading volumes would typically be high as many funds adjust their positions. One of Japan’s most closely watched economic indicators, the Bank of Japan’s Tankan survey, was also released just 10 minutes before trading was set to begin.

The failure was the first all-day stoppage of trading since the exchange shifted from the open-outcry trading pit to a fully-electronic system in 1999. Previous system glitches had only affected part of the trading day.

“This is very problematic — when things like this happen, investor confidence in the Japanese market gets impacted,” said Ryuta Otsuka, a strategist at Toyo Securities Co. “It could later weigh on Japanese stocks.”

Exchange Outage is Latest Blow to Tokyo’s Financial Hub Dreams

AWS/Microsoft Outage Causes Email Disruption

Posted on
Microsoft email down 9-29-20

 

Amazon + Microsoft failures =

The Great & Powerful Amazon and Microsoft can fail!

Combating this “double whammy” we have put in several 24 hour days

some know as we have spoken to them at all hours.

No complaints, this is what we have been doing since 1992. Over 29 years and only a handful of issues that you can count on 3 fingers.

  • Yes – Within 24 hours almost 95% of systems were back
  • Yes – We know if you were in the 5% it is a problem
  • Yes – Some issues took time for them to fix: some phones not 100% syncing and a few reporting a 30-60 day gap in past emails – most all have been solved – if u see a gap in emails let us know, we are working on these as a case by case basis.
  • Yes – We had backups and some were corrupted
  • Yes – Most if not all customers were operational in a few hours.

What we must remember, and the lesson learned is, “technology scaled at this level can fail”.

What you may be asking is “How can we protect from this in the future?”

The short answer is “You cannot”

Failures will always occur and data loss is always a possibility – If you have not lost data than you have not been using computers long enough.

The longer answer is 2 fold:

  • You can pay for email backup services or manually backup your emails.  Just like remote backup protects your data, email backups can protect your emails – or at lease add another layer of protection (remember, the mighty Microsoft failed)
  • You can back up your own emails on your system – you can do this daily, weekly your choice. It is a manual process and requires you to physically do it – if you forget for a week/month than any recovery will be back to that time of last backup. If your pc failes than your backup is also gone. This has always been available as one of the hundreds of features of outlook.

Read: How to Back Up Outlook: https://www.bulldogtechinc.com/2015/07/06/how-to-properly-back-up-microsoft-outlook/

Bulldog Tech always offered email backups at an additional cost  – “why pay for a service that is rarely used, over 10 years we have never lost emails” you ask and its a good point – Until something fails.

Moving Forward – Adapt and Overcome

  • We added a 3rd data center in the Midwest to handle load and fail-over.
  • We will be migrating to the newest Microsoft Exchange versions as Microsoft is NOW forcing an upgrade. Once completed, will have the additional features offered by these upgrades which we will be outlining as we move forward with the migration.
  • We will be reducing prices on email backups for those customers that wish to add another layer of protection

We will be sending out update emails as we move forward on these.

As always thanks – if you have any issues, email, and call us – we are still here!

Anthony and the vanguard staff!

From Amazon tech support:

“The service team was not able to recover the impaired data volume  This happened due to an underling host issue.” Please note, that we make every commercially available effort to ensure Amazon Web Services is highly available and resilient, however hardware and software failures are unfortunately inevitable in technology at this scale. On behalf of Amazon, please accept my apologies”

Microsoft:

Microsoft Outlook was down as problems with Exchange Online spread worldwide. Microsoft Outlook has suffered a worldwide outage, the second within a week for Office users. On Monday, September 28, Microsoft users suffered a massive outage impacting Teams, Office 365 and Outlook. Now, just 48 hours after you thought everything was back to normal, Microsoft Outlook has gone down again. Within an hour is was confirmed that the issue affects users worldwide.

Microsoft confirmed that users might be experiencing problems with the Exchange Online protocols, including Outlook desktop and mobile.

Read the entire article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/10/01/new-worldwide-microsoft-outage-confirmed-heres-what-we-know/#354ffd85d370

The NEW ShowMyOffice is Coming!

Posted on

After 12 reliable years, your virtual office is ready for an upgrade

What’s New:

  • Microsoft Office 2016 Apps powered by Microsoft Office 365
  • Completely web based; does not require installing any software
  • Sign in from anywhere, run Quickbooks, Print, Scan, and Edit work on your documents from any web browser, on any device, as long as you have an internet connection
  • With BETTER SSL security, the new ShowMyOffice is more secure than ever.


We launched ShowMyOffice back in the summer of 2008. Since then it has provided virtual office services for our hosted clients. Over the years we’ve adapted to changing technologies and made it easier, faster, and added more apps; along with remote printing and scanning. We virtualized many legacy applications for our customers and ran them in the cloud.

In the coming weeks we will be contacting our existing clients to migrate you to the new system.

Epoxy IT Table

Posted on
epoxy IT table

Our new Epoxy table created with old motherboards, hard drives, lights and a history our our company. Created entirely in-house using a solid core closet door and molding for the sides. Last step is to polish to a mirror shine.


Epoxy “Lava” Table

One Drive Not Syncing?

Posted on

If you notice your one drive is not staying open, open a command prompt and type in the following to reset one drive:

%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset

reset one drive

If the above fix does not work, contact us for further assistance.

The Bulldog Staff