Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily read on the stories shaping our digital world.
GitLab went down today, and for the thousands of development teams who depend on it to ship code, that outage was a sharp reminder of how much critical infrastructure now lives behind a single platform. The status page confirmed the disruption, and the Hacker News thread filled quickly with engineers sharing workarounds and frustration in equal measure.
From infrastructure failure to a rather different kind of security failure — a new report out of The Register details a company where every single employee password was stored in one Excel file. No encryption, no access controls, just a spreadsheet sitting somewhere on a network, waiting to become someone's worst day. It is the kind of story that sounds like a cautionary tale from a decade ago, and yet here we are.
On a more hopeful note, Prince William's Homewards programme is partnering with Salesforce to use artificial intelligence and big data in an attempt to predict and prevent homelessness before it takes hold. The idea is to identify people at risk early enough to intervene — a genuinely interesting application of machine learning where the stakes are human lives, not click rates.
That is your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
