Batterie Store Blog

Microsoft has unveiled Windows 11, its “next generation” operating system, at a virtual event.

The new software will let Android apps run on the Windows desktop.

Product manager Panos Panay promised smaller, faster security updates – a common complaint for Windows users – and said they would happen in the background.

Windows 11 will also let users configure multiple desktops for work, home, and gaming, like on a Mac.

Microsoft says there are currently about 1.3 billion devices running Windows 10.

An early preview version of the new system will be released for app developers next week.

Windows 11 will be available as a free update to existing Windows 10 users – although some devices will not have the right specifications. These include a minimum of 64 gigabytes of storage and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

One cosmetic change is putting the “Start” button at the bottom-centre of the screen rather than left-hand side.

In addition, Windows 11 will feature tighter integration with Microsoft’s communications platform Teams. Xbox Games Pass, a subscription service offering access to hundreds of games, will also be pre-installed.

The tech giant said it would share more profits from its app store with creators and developers – as rival Apple continues to face challenges over its business model.

When Windows 10 launched in 2015, Microsoft said it would be the final version of the operating system. It has since announced Windows 10 will be retired in 2025.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella described the launch as “a major milestone in the history of Windows”, but analyst Geoff Blaber from CCS Insight said he did not consider it to be “a revolutionary step”.

“Windows 11 is an iterative release that pinpoints where Windows needs greater ambition, rather than introducing the sweeping changes seen with its predecessor,” he said.

“The end game for Microsoft is ensuring that the step up from Windows 10 to Windows 11 provides significant enough improvements to offset any complaints.”

Forrester’s principal analyst JP Gownder noted that the new operating system was based on the code of Windows 10, which should prevent upgrade glitches such as those seen in the past with Windows Vista.

“These user-friendly nods to the past are a double-edged sword, though,” he added.

“They’re great for continuity of experience, but they make you wonder what the 11 really stands for. Is this really more of an admittedly feature-rich Windows 10 update than a full-version release?”

The European Commission has announced plans to build a Joint Cyber Unit to tackle large scale cyber-attacks.

Recent ransomware incidents on critical services in Ireland and the US has “focused minds”, the commission said.

It argued cyber-attacks were a national security threat, as incidents in Europe rose from 432 in 2019 to 756 in 2020.

A dedicated team of multi-national cyber-experts will be rapidly deployed to European countries during serious attacks, it said.

Launching the proposals, European Commission vice-president Margaritis Schinas said last month’s hack on US fuel supplies was ‘the “nightmare scenario that we have to prepare against”.

Last month, a cyber-criminal gang called Darkside forced the Colonial Pipeline offline for nearly a week, causing panic buying and fuel shortages.

Ransomware hackers use malicious software to scramble and steal an organisation’s computer data – charging victims money to return services back to normal.

The US government has also recently formed a Ransomware Task Force, while the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warns that ransomware is the biggest cyber-threat to UK.

The European Commission said that the ongoing ransomware attack on Ireland’s health service is another sign that cyber-attacks are a national security issue.

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The Health Service Executive (HSE) in Ireland was hit by a ransomware group called Conti which scrambled IT systems, causing major disruption to many hospitals.

HSE chief Paul Reid told the Oireachtas health committee on Wednesday that it will take months to fix the system.

He said it will cost as much as €100m (£85m) to recover, and will also have large “human costs”.

Thierry Breton, EU commissioner for the internal market, told reporters that the Joint Cyber Unit’s rapid reaction teams could have helped Ireland recover from the crisis.

He said the unit would help in similar scenarios by “deploying very quickly a dedicated team which we don’t have the capacity to do now. We know that the longer you wait the worse it is, so faster and more solidarity is what you can expect”.

Mr Breton insisted that the new unit will not compete with national cyber-entities or duplicate work.

He promised to build a team to provide support virtually and physically, using resources “from one country to another” to deliver operational and technical assistance.

The aim is to ensure that the Joint Cyber Unit will be operational by June next year, and that it will be fully established one year later, by 30 June 2023.

Bitcoin has fallen below $30,000 for the first time in more than five months, hit by China’s crackdown on the world’s most popular cryptocurrency.

The digital currency slipped to about $28,890, and has lost more than 50% of its value since reaching an all-time high of $64,870 in April.

China has told banks and payments platforms to stop supporting digital currency transactions.

It follows an order on Friday to stop Bitcoin mining in Sichuan province.

On Monday, China’s central bank said it had recently summoned several major banks and payments companies to call on them to take tougher action over the trading of cryptocurrencies.

Banks were told to not provide products or services such as trading, clearing and settlement for cryptocurrency transactions, the People’s Bank of China said in a statement.

China’s third-largest lender by assets, the Agricultural Bank of China, said it was following the PBOC’s guidance and would conduct due diligence on clients to root out illegal activities involving cryptocurrency mining and transactions.

China’s Postal Savings Bank also said it would not facilitate any cryptocurrency transactions.

The mobile and online payments platform Alipay, which is owned by Chinese financial technology giant Ant Group, said it would set up a monitoring system to detect illegal cryptocurrency transactions.

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The latest measure came after authorities in the southwest province of Sichuan on Friday ordered Bitcoin mining operations to close down.

Authorities ordered the closure of 26 mines last week, according to a notice widely circulated on Chinese social media sites and confirmed by a former Bitcoin miner.

Sichuan, a mountainous region in southwest China, is home to many cryptocurrency mines – basically huge centres with racks upon racks of computer processors, owing to the large number of hydroelectric power plants there.

China accounted for around 65% of global Bitcoin production last year, with Sichuan rating as its second largest producer, according to research by the University of Cambridge.

“Concerns mount over China’s ongoing clampdown and fears that widespread acceptance of Bitcoin and other digital currencies will be delayed because of concerns about their environmental impact,” noted analyst Fawad Razaqzada at trading site ThinkMarkets.

Last month China’s cabinet, the State Council, said it would crack down on cryptocurrency mining and trading as part of a campaign to control financial risks.

Some analysts have warned of potential further falls in the price of Bitcoin due to a price chart phenomenon known as a “death cross”, which occurs when a short-term average trendline crosses below a long-term average trendline.

Other cryptocurrencies also fell as investors worried about tougher regulation of digital currencies around the world.

Separately, the auction house Sotheby’s said that a rare pear-shaped diamond that is expected to sell for as much as $15m can be bought at an auction next month using cryptocurrencies.

It is the first time that such a large diamond has been offered in a public sale with cryptocurrency.

“I’ve been working in logistics for 30 years and I’ve never seen demand like this,” says Robin Woodbridge.

The company he works for, Prologis, owns and manages warehouse logistics parks across the UK.

They’re building as fast as they can, but it’s been a struggle to keep pace with the boom in online shopping in recent years.

And the pandemic has only served to accelerate the trend, making warehousing hot property.

Prologis’s biggest park, known as Dirft, is just off the M1 near Northampton. You can see the big sheds towering over the fields from the motorway. It’s a vast site with three rail freight terminals.

When you click to buy online, there’s a good chance the product will start its journey here, whether that’s baked beans, laptops, furniture or fashion.

Despite its size, it’s not big enough.

Hundreds of construction workers are beavering away on expanding the site.

“We’re building buildings speculatively, which means we haven’t got a customer lined up, and we’re letting them before we finish, something which doesn’t happen very often,” says Mr Woodbridge, who is head of capital deployment for the firm.

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It wasn’t that long ago that warehouses were unloved by investors, who continued to pour money into retail and office space.

But things look very different now. Our High Streets and town centres are grappling with too much retail space and the logistics sector can’t build warehouses quickly enough.

New research from Savills, commissioned by the UK Warehousing Association, shows the dramatic increase in warehouse space in the last six years.

In 2015, there was 428 million square feet of large warehouse space in the UK. That’s now risen by 32% – adding the equivalent of an extra 2,396 football pitches.

The occupancy mix has also changed. In 2015, High Street retailers were the dominant occupiers, but now they’ve been overtaken by third party logistics providers, like DHL and Yodel, who fulfil and deliver most of our online shopping.

The biggest take-up in space, as the chart below shows, has come from the so-called pureplay online retailers, firms which don’t have physical stores and only sell online, such as Boohoo. These online retailers have increased their warehouse footprint by 614% in just six years.

The sheds themselves are also getting bigger. At Dirft, a super-sized building is taking shape which is the size of ten football pitches. The warehouse will be Royal Mail’s biggest parcel hub, processing more than a million packages a day.

“Without these sheds, society can’t function. These facilities make everyday life possible”, says Mr Woodbridge.

He reckons that for every additional billion pounds in spending online, a further 775,000 sq ft of warehouse space is needed to support it.

When this vast logistics park is eventually filled, some 15,000 people are expected to be employed here. A new training academy will open shortly to help attract and train people for a career in logistics.

“Gone are the days when you had a man in a brown coat,” says Kevin Mofid, head of industrials and logistics research at Savills.

“As online retail has grown, the type of people required in warehousing has changed as well, now it’s robotics engineers and data scientists. Warehouses have become huge centres of technical excellence to gain efficiencies.”

And he believes there’s a long way to go before the UK reaches “peak shed”.

Savills tracks how much warehouse space companies require and says that demand is continuing to soar, by 232% in the first quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2020.

Kevin Mofid says this race for space reflects more than just our changing shopping habits.

“There’s also increased demand in manufacturing and automotive. For instance, there will be new battery plants for electric vehicles, and as a result of Brexit, companies will want to store more goods in the UK,” he believes.

It may prove a challenge to continue expanding at this pace.

Peter Ward, chief executive of the UK Warehousing Association says the government needs to recognise the importance to the economy of this fast-growing sector.

“While we hear a great deal about building 250,000 new homes each year over the next five years, the fact that this will create a million new delivery points seems to have been largely overlooked.

“It is high time for warehousing to be baked into planning policy, in the same way that GP surgeries and schools are an accepted part of infrastructure planning,” he says.

A company backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is set to build a large-scale nuclear fusion demonstration plant in Oxfordshire.

Canada’s General Fusion is one of the leading private firms aiming to turn the promise of fusion into a commercially viable energy source.

The new facility will be built at Culham, home to the UK’s national fusion research programme.

It won’t generate power, but will be 70% the size of a commercial reactor.

General Fusion will enter into a long-term commercial lease with the UK Atomic Energy Authority following the construction of the facility at the Culham campus.

While commercial details have not been disclosed, the development is said to cost around $400m.

It aims to be operational by 2025.

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Fusion is the process by which the Sun generates energy. Harnessing it here on Earth is seen as a critical step towards greener nuclear power.

It differs from the traditional nuclear approach by attempting to fuse atoms together rather than splitting them.

In theory, fusion promises a safer, carbon-free energy source that produces very little radioactive waste.

But getting atoms to fuse together at temperatures several times hotter than the surface of the Sun has proven a huge technological and financial challenge.

A major international effort to build a fusion reactor is underway in the south of France with the Iter project.

But this $20bn dollar venture has been hampered by delays and isn’t likely to be working effectively until after 2035.

Frustrated by the slow progress, private companies across the world have been following their own approaches, and General Fusion’s effort is seen as one of the most advanced.

Backed by Jeff Bezos for over a decade, the company raised $100m in its last round of funding and is preparing to go back to investors for more cash to show that the firm’s technology can be successfully scaled up.

The company uses an approach called magnetised target fusion.

In this process, a super-heated gas called a plasma, consisting of a particular form of hydrogen, is injected into a cylinder which is surrounded by a wall of liquid metal.

Hundreds of pneumatic pistons are then used to compress the plasma until the atoms fuse, generating massive amounts of heat.

This heat is transferred by the liquid metal, and used to boil water and make steam to drive a turbine.

The company says that a key advantage of their approach is that much of the technology exists in industry already.

This is a very different approach to that being taken by other fusion programmes, at Culham for example.

The campus is owned and managed by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and is also the location of major fusion research efforts: the Joint European Torus (Jet) and Mast Upgrade.

“Coming to Culham gives us the opportunity to benefit from UKAEA’s expertise,” said Christofer Mowry, the chief executive of General Fusion.

“By locating at this campus, General Fusion expands our market presence beyond North America into Europe, broadening our global network of government, institutional, and industrial partners.

“This is incredibly exciting news for not only General Fusion, but also the global effort to develop practical fusion energy.”

The decision to locate the demonstration plant in Oxfordshire was made possible by funding from the UK government, with the monetary amount described by Christofer Mowry in wire agency reports as “very meaningful”.

While UK ministers were positive about the development, they wouldn’t be drawn on the amount of taxpayer’s money involved.

The government says the agreement with General Fusion will support hundreds of jobs both in Oxfordshire and beyond, during the 3-year construction phase, as well as many others during the operational phase.

They say it will complement the government’s commitment of £222m for the UKAEA’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (Step) programme, which aims to design and build the world’s first prototype fusion power plant by 2040.

“This new plant by General Fusion is a huge boost for our plans to develop a fusion industry in the UK, and I’m thrilled that Culham will be home to such a cutting-edge and potentially transformative project,” said UK Science Minister Amanda Solloway.

“Fusion energy has great potential as a source of limitless, low-carbon energy, and today’s announcement is a clear vote of confidence in the region and the UK’s status as a global science superpower.”

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind the smash-hit video app TikTok, saw its earnings double last year.

An internal memo released to staff showed that the firm’s total revenue jumped by 111% to $34.3bn (£24.7bn) for 2020.

The figures underscore TikTok’s continued global popularity.

It comes as ByteDance and several other Chinese technology giants have come under increasing pressure from governments around the world.

ByteDance also saw its annual gross profit rise by 93% to to $19bn, while it recorded a net loss of $45bn for the same period.

The net loss was attributed to a one-off accounting adjustment and not related to the company’s operations.

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The memo also showed that ByteDance had around 1.9bn monthly active users across all of its platforms as of December last year.

A ByteDance spokesperson confirmed the figures to the BBC.

White House pressure
The massive popularity of TikTok has meant that ByteDance has been scrutinised by governments around the world, including in the US and China.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that an executive order signed by President Joe Biden earlier this month would force some Chinese apps to take tougher measures to protect user data if they wanted to stay in the US market.

It came after President Biden revoked an executive order from his predecessor Donald Trump that banned Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat in the US.

The ban faced a series of legal challenges and never came into force.

Instead, the US Department of Commerce said it would review apps designed and developed by those in “the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary”, such as China.

It should use an “evidence-based approach” to see if they pose a risk to US national security, President Biden said.

During the previous administration, President Trump regularly attacked ByteDance, accusing TikTok of being a threat to US national security.

Politicians and officials raised concerns about users’ personal data being passed to the Chinese government.

TikTok has denied accusations that it shared user data with Beijing.

Beijing scrutiny
In April, Chinese regulators called on 13 online platforms, including ByteDance, to adhere to tighter regulations in their financial divisions.

It came as part of a wider push to rein in the country’s technology giants.

The authorities said the aim was to prevent monopolistic behaviour and the “disorderly expansion of capital”.

For many years, Beijing had taken a hands off approach to encourage the technology industry to grow.

Company shake-up
In May, ByteDance announced that the company’s CEO and co-founder Zhang Yiming would step down and transition to a new role by the end of the year.

In a letter to employees, Mr Zhang said he would be succeeded by fellow co-founder Rubo Liang.

“The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analysing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people,” Mr Zhang wrote in a message on the company’s website.

“Similarly, I’m not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible,” he added.

The move marked the biggest shake-up at the Chinese technology giant since its launch almost a decade ago.

Social-media users are sharing Google Street View images featuring friends and relatives who have since died.

It was sparked by a post on the Twitter account Fesshole, which asks followers to submit anonymous confessions – many of which are explicit.

The original poster said they had searched the map platform for images taken before their father had died.

Launched in the US in 2007, Google Street View has since rolled out worldwide.

The BBC’s Neil Henderson shared an image of his late father at his front door.

“I have literally hundreds of pics of my dad but the Google Street View is quite affecting, like he’s still around,” he wrote.

Another tweeter showed an image of a couple holding hands in the street – his parents, he said, who had died several years ago.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
View original tweet on Twitter
One captured a lady just outside her doorway. “My mum creeping outside for a cigarette,” wrote Bernard Baker.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
View original tweet on Twitter

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
View original tweet on Twitter
Others said just seeing local images taken when their loved ones were still alive made them feel a connection.

And some expressed regret images poignant to them had been replaced with more recent photos.

There is, however, a way to look back at previous incarnations – by tapping the clock icon on the top left-hand side of Google Maps (the feature does not appear on Google Earth), if it is there.

Karim Palant used this tool to find a former image of his late grandfather Charles Palant, taken from the street in 2015 and showing him leaning out of his window from his apartment in Paris to talk to his carer below.

A Christmas release date for Halo: Infinite was among dozens of announcements at Microsoft’s E3 show.

It was scheduled for release last year alongside the new Xbox, but was delayed due to the pandemic and amid outcry from players over its graphics.

A new Forza racing game and the Xbox release of Flight Simulator were also among the 30 titles revealed.

It was the first E3 since Microsoft acquired Bethesda last year for $7.5bn (£5.3bn).

Unlike other developers’ conferences, the 90-minute Microsoft show was nearly entirely back-to-back game trailers and announcements, with few speeches in-between.

Bethesda boss Todd Howard started the event with news of a November 2022 release date for the firm’s first new series in 25 years, Starfield.

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The space-faring game was shown only with some in-game footage of a ship taking off from the surface of another world – revealing no new details about what its gameplay would be like.

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Halo: Infinite was officially delayed due to the pandemic.

But a preview released in July 2020 was widely criticised by fans of the game as looking unpolished, with enemy character models labelled as crude and reminiscent of older games, rather than a next-gen title. The developers pledged to work hard on improving them.

Sunday’s video showed off the series hero Master Chief meeting a new AI character, as the two discussed a mystery around the fate of Cortana, the game’s other long-running protagonist.

But it notably did not include the alien enemy models which caused so much controversy last year.

Microsoft did, however, show off the game’s multiplayer mode for the first time – the main attraction for many players.

Sticking to plans to make the multiplayer part of the game a free-to-play package, not requiring a purchase of the main product, Microsoft said it would release it alongside the game for the Christmas shopping season.

The company’s flagship racing title, Forza Horizon 5, set in Mexico, was also revealed for the first time with a 9 November release date.

Developers said parts of Mexico’s real landscape had been faithfully recreated using photogrammetry data – the same type of 3D technique used by Microsoft’s Flight Simulator to map realistic cities. But in Forza’s case, it was used for geographic features such as the caldera of a volcano.

A new game mode would allow players to create their own challenges – such as a “bowling alley” map where players drove through bowling pins and over ramps.

Flight Sim gets Top Gun
Another impending release was the arrival of Flight Simulator for Xbox consoles on 27 July.

The game was first released in August 2020 on PCs, and is notorious for pushing even high-end gaming computers to their limits.

A new expansion was also shown off, tied to the Top Gun film series – which will bring official support for fighter-jet style planes for the first time. Previously, such planes have only been available through player mods or paid add-ons.

Microsoft’s surprise pandemic hit, the pirate-themed Sea of Thieves, is also getting an expansion featuring Pirates of the Caribbean characters – including Captain Jack Sparrow.

Other titles announced included:

Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, a next-gen sequel to the 2007 original
The first gameplay footage of Battlefield 2042, announced with a cinematic trailer a few days before
Psychonauts 2, a much-anticipated sequel to Double Fine’s beloved platformer, releasing 25 August
The Outer Worlds 2, a follow-up to the 2019 original
Redfall, a new shooter from Dishonored developer Arkane, featuring a vampire-hunting group of magically-enhanced gun-wielding characters
Of the 30 titles unveiled, 27 are included in Xbox’s subscription service, Game Pass.

‘Constant flow’
Piers Harding-Rolls, games analyst at Ampere, said that Microsoft’s strategy was to grow the service to tens of millions of users by accepting a broad range of new games from third party developers.

“It needs to have a constant flow of fresh and appealing content in the pipeline,” he said.

“Certain types of new games are particularly suited to Game Pass – generally those that benefit more from a ready-made audience compared to just competing with other premium releases in the store.”

Notably absent from Microsoft’s show was any mention from Bethesda of the Elder Scrolls 6, the sequel to Skyrim announced at E3 2018.

And in a nod to gamer jokes about the Xbox Series X’s boxy upright aesthetic, the firm closed the show with the reveal of an Xbox-shaped mini-fridge which it said it would sell near the end of the year.

Square Enix followed Microsoft, revealing its new Guardians of the Galaxy title which will be a single-player adventure game, and an expansion for The Avengers which will focus on the Black Panther character.

Monday’s conferences include Resident Evil maker Capcom.

But Microsoft’s lengthy showcase is arguably the biggest of the weekend – until Nintendo’s 40-minute presentation on Tuesday.

Facebook will let all employees who can work away from the office do so after the Covid pandemic is over.

The company has told employees “anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work”.

Rival big tech firms Apple and Google have recently reversed pandemic working conditions, telling staff to return to the office in the coming months.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told staff he plans to spend up to half of 2022 working remotely.

He had previously said that half of the company’s 60,000 employees could be working from home within a decade.

Facebook’s offices are expected to open to full capacity in October, but employees without permission to work remotely will have to come in at least half the time.

A Facebook executive, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, declined to say how many employees currently had permission to work from home, but said the company had approved about 90% of requests.

Contracted out
The company told the BBC that its new remote work policies apply to Facebook employees only, and not subcontractors, who are widely used to carry out content moderation and other tasks.

In November 2020, content moderators openly accused Facebook of forcing them back into the office.

At the time, the company said that the majority of its 15,000 global content reviewers had been working remotely, and would be able to do so for the duration of the pandemic.

Mr Zuckerberg set out his own experience of remote working in a separate memo to staff.

He said being out of the office had made him “happier and more productive at work”, adding it had given him “more space for long-term thinking” and enabled him to “spend more time with my family”.

Mr Zuckerberg spends some of his time on his private estate in Hawaii.

Home days
Other tech giants have also set out their future plans for the return to the office.

On Thursday, Amazon told employees they’re expected to work in-office at least three days per week, with the specific days to be decided on by leadership teams.

Employees in the UK, US and a handful of other countries are expected to begin their return to the office in early September.

In an all-staff memo last week Apple boss Tim Cook said he missed the “hum of activity” and workers should be in the office at least three days a week by September, specifying Wednesdays and Fridays as when employees may work remotely.

But that plan proved controversial among some employees, who circulated a letter that said Apple’s policy had “already forced some of our colleagues to quit”.

In a message to “Googlers” in May, chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote that the company would move to a hybrid work week, where most staff would “spend approximately three days in the office, and two days wherever they work best”.

The changes, he wrote, should eventually result in the majority of employees being in the office a few days a week, and about a fifth working remotely full-time.

Mr Pichai added: “The future of work is flexibility.”

A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.

Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.

The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet.

Fastly apologised and said the problem should have been anticipated.

The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit some popular websites such as Amazon, Reddit, the Guardian and the New York Times.

Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell said: “This outage was broad and severe – and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

The company operates servers at strategic points around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end users.

But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing “85% of our network to return errors”, it said.

Engineers had worked out the cause of the problem about 40 minutes after websites had gone offline at about 11:00 BST, Fastly said.

“Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” it said.

The company has deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident” and to “figure out why we didn’t detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes”.