Amazon is having a technical meltdown that’s left Alexa and its AWS cloud service reeling on its biggest shopping day of the year

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amazon web services

Read Article At Business Insider

Even amazon has issues at times!

  • Amazon’s website has been up and down since its Prime Day sales event kicked off at 3 p.m. ET in the US.
  • Roughly an hour after Prime Day began, Amazon’s personal AI assistant, Alexa, also started experiencing technical problems.
  • Users report being unable to login to the app, and Alexa-powered devices being unresponsive to commands.

Amazon’s website has been up and down since the start of its Prime Day sales extravaganza in the United States on Monday, and now the issues are starting to affect the company’s AI personal assistant, Alexa, and portions of its cloud hosting service as well.

User reports to DownDetector.com are showing that Alexa and the corresponding smartphone app started having issues around 3:50 p.m., nearly an hour after Prime Day — Amazon’s biggest shopping day of the year — began.

According to the site, poor server connection and issues logging in are among the most commonly reported by users. One commentator says when giving a command to his Alexa-powered device, the personal assistant cannot process the request and just says, “Sorry, something went wrong.”

Business Insider reporters were unable to log in to the app on multiple devices, and received multiple error messages, including this one:

Alexa’s downtime is one of many technical issues Amazon is facing on its busiest day of the year, including temporary website crashes and broken links across the site.

While the Amazon Web Services cloud itself appears to be operational, some users are finding that the management console is inaccessible and users are encountering the puppy dog error page as well.

These technical glitches are likely to cost Amazon millions of dollars in lost sales. One Click Retail estimates that Amazon sells about $1 million per minute during peak time on Prime Day, based on last year’s data. As of the time of writing, Amazon’s site issues had lasted for more than one hour.

Amazon provided the following statement to Business Insider: “Some customers are having difficulty shopping, and we’re working to resolve this issue quickly. Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime Day in the U.S., customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year. There are hundreds of thousands of deals to come and more than 34 hours to shop Prime Day.”

As for AWS, another spokesperson provided this statement: “AWS continues to function normally. We saw some intermittent AWS Management Console issues earlier today, but they did not drive any meaningful impact on Amazon’s consumer business.”

Remove Outlook Autologin

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Remove Outlook Autologin

Outlook 2010/2007

  • Launch Outlook 2010
  • Select Accounts Settings… under the Account Settings icon.
  • Under the E-mail tab, select the email account you want to edit and click Change…
  • Click More Settings…
  • Click the Security tab.
  • Check the Always prompt for logon credentials option.
  • Click OK to close the pop up window.

FBI: “Please Reboot Your Router”

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Plenty of news outlets have reported on the existence of a rather nasty-sounding malware – thought to originate in Russia – that may have already infected hundreds of thousands of Internet routers up and down the country. The FBI, however, may have a surprisingly easy fix for the problem: switch your router off, then turn it on again.

The official FBI public service announcement explains what this piece of malicious software is capable of. “VPNFilter is able to render small office and home office routers inoperable,” it notes, adding that “the malware can potentially also collect information passing through the router.”

It’s not easy to discover, either. Apparently, identifying and assessing the network activity of the malware in question “is complicated by its use of encryption and misattributable networks.”

Clearly, it’s a sophisticated piece of tech; the FBI attributes the malware to “foreign cyber actors” and The New York Times reports that it’s of Russian origin, with the Justice Department linking it to the Sofacy Group. Also known as Fancy Bear, this is the same Russian military intelligence agency outlet that hacked the DNC servers prior to the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI explains that “the size and scope of the infrastructure impacted by VPNFilter malware is significant. The malware targets routers produced by several manufacturers and network-attached storage devices by at least one manufacturer.”

This sounds both grim and complicated, which makes it all the more impressive that the temporary solution to the problem may be deceptively simple. “The FBI recommends any owner of small office and home office routers reboot the devices to temporarily disrupt the malware and aid the potential identification of infected devices,” it says, almost nonchalantly.

ArsTechnica reports that later “stages” of the malware, which steal data and so on, are temporarily disabled during a reboot. Upon rebooting, stage one calls out to the now-seized website for instructions, which allows the FBI to identify the infected device.

They also advise people to perhaps disable any remote management settings on their device, make sure their passwords are strong, and to activate any encryption software if available. If you can, make sure the devices are operating the most up-to-date version of the firmware.

According to the Guardian, the warning followed on from a recent court order that permitted the FBI to take control of a website, one the hackers planned to use to command the malware within the routers. Although this ability has since been disabled, the routers still remain infected if no further action has been taken on the part of the owners.

Far from just the US, by the way, infections have apparently been detected in at least 54 countries, with Ukraine thought to be the prime target for the hackers.

New Quickbooks on ShowMyOffice!

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quickbooks

You now have the latest version of Quickbooks!

We updated all of our hosted clients to Quickbooks Enterprise 18. Some new features and improvements include:

  • Control, customize, and automate your pricing right in QuickBooks with Advanced Pricing.6 Just set up price rules and all the calculations are done for you.
  • Advanced Reporting puts the information you need right at your fingertips. Build powerful, customizable reports that are auto-filled with company data. Easy templates for contractor, manufacturing & wholesale, non-profit, and retail let you create reports specifically for your industry.
  • Enterprise has 6x the capacity of other QuickBooks products, allowing for up to 1 million items, users, and vendors
  • Enterprise has editions dedicated to contractor, manufacturing and wholesale, nonprofit, and retail so that you can get specialized features like reports and chart of accounts specifically for your industry.
  • Grow your business without sacrificing control over user access. Set individual user permissions for every role. Predefined, user role templates are included for fast setup.
    Scale up to 30 users
  • Enterprise grows with you, letting you scale from 1 to 30 users who can all work at the same time. But you maintain access and control, assigning user permissions as you see fit for your business.9
    One-click insights dashboard
  • Know how your business is doing in one click. The insights dashboard tells the story of your business visually with graphs that zero in on key performance indicators like profit and loss, business growth, net profit margin, income and expenses, and top customers.
  • Having to remember the timing of various payroll liabilities — like federal and state payroll taxes and workers’ comp — can be a real stressor. But now you can rest easy knowing you’ll get a reminder right on your home screen seven days before liabilities are due
  • Large accounts are easier to manage with an added search bar right in Chart of Accounts. You can quickly find an account or subaccount and search by account name or account number.
    Cash/accrual toggle
  • Now all it takes is one click in the report window to switch from cash to accrual basis and back again. You’ll be able to easily analyze your business from different angles. It’s great for businesses that report in one basis and file taxes in another.
    Past due stamp
  • QuickBooks can automatically add a “Past Due” notice on overdue invoices so you can get customers to pay you faster. You can easily remove it from specific invoices by just toggling it off with one click.

Should you need any help, as always feel free to contact us.