Daily Crunch: A bad month for the internet

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1. It was a really bad month for the internet

In the past month, there were several major internet outages affecting millions of users across the world. Sites buckled, services broke, images wouldn’t load, direct messages ground to a halt and calendars and email were unavailable for hours at a time.

What can we learn? For one, internet providers need to do better with routing filters. Secondly, perhaps it’s not a good idea to run new code directly on a production system.

2. Twitter and Facebook reportedly not invited to White House ‘social media summit’

Trump’s White House is hosting what it calls “a robust conversation on the opportunities and challenges of today’s online environment” this week. But according to a new report from CNN, neither Facebook nor Twitter qualify as “digital leaders,” as neither platform has received an invite.

3. ICE mined driver’s license photos for facial recognition

News broke over the weekend that the FBI and immigration officials access images — often without obtaining a search warrant or court order — in order to identify criminal suspects but also witnesses, victims and innocent bystanders. In some cases agents would simply email the state department of motor vehicles for assistance.

4. 15Five raises $30.7M to expand its employee development toolkit

15Five builds software and services to help organizations and their employees evaluate their performance, as well as set and meet goals.

5. UK’s ICO fines British Airways a record £183M over GDPR breach that leaked data from 500,000 users

The fine — 1.5% of BA’s total revenues for 2018 — is the highest-ever that the U.K.’s information commissioner has leveled at a company over a data breach.

6. The startups creating the future of RegTech and financial services

From a practical perspective, everything from the security requirements to the sales process are substantially different for RegTech startups targeting financial services. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

There was no holiday break for the Original Content team, as we reviewed the new season of “Stranger Things.”