Amazon Web Services has confirmed that customer data hosted in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions was permanently lost following Iranian drone strikes on data centers six months ago. AWS said one of three UAE availability zones and all three Bahrain zones suffered damage beyond what its backup systems could withstand, and it remains unable to restore access to some resources.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-17
Businesses are tracking rising leads, engagement, and sales quotas alongside faster customer service response times, yet customers remain dissatisfied despite these positive indicators. The disconnect suggests that standard departmental metrics are failing to capture the actual customer experience.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-17
An Entrepreneur opinion piece uses a fictional Norwegian town plagued by repeated house fires to illustrate 'systemization thinking': instead of repeatedly dispatching firefighters, residents traced the fires to flammable soundproofing material installed under kitchen walls by the original builder. Once that material was removed and smoke alarms installed, the fires stopped for good, illustrating how fixing an underlying flaw beats repeatedly treating the same recurring problem.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-16
An entrepreneur with over 15 years running a public relations firm outlines five practical habits for scaling a business without letting customer service quality slip. The core recommendation is treating business development as a scheduled, recurring task rather than an afterthought squeezed in during slow periods.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-15
CenterPoint Energy has confirmed in an SEC filing that an unauthorized party accessed customer personal information through one of its external-facing systems. The disclosure follows claims from a hacker who says they exfiltrated 7.49 million records—including names, addresses, account numbers, billing details and partial Social Security numbers—by exploiting an unprotected public API lacking rate limiting or firewall defenses.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-09-15
Customer experience consultant Adrian Swinscoe and other business advisers are drawing on punk subculture's anti-establishment, do-it-yourself values as a corrective to corporate practices they see as overly metric-driven and impersonal. Swinscoe reportedly grew frustrated that his field had drifted toward benchmarks and abstract data at the expense of genuine customer connection, prompting him to look to punk's ethos for inspiration.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-15
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has introduced the Streaming Integrity Initiative, a set of five commitments aimed at reducing fraudulent streaming activity. Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group and Merlin are among the first distributors to back the effort, which focuses on verifying identities, vetting content, detecting bad actors and sharing intelligence across platforms. IFPI is now calling on additional distributors to join the initiative.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-14
As Anthropic prepares for a potentially record-breaking IPO, many of its U.S. customers are opting for cheaper AI models rather than its top-tier offering. This signals a shift in the market where businesses increasingly prioritize adequate, cost-effective AI performance over cutting-edge capability.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-13
The head of roofing maintenance company Roof Maxx describes how his team distinguishes valuable customer feedback from distracting or inaccurate criticism, despite holding a 4.9-star average across more than 20,000 reviews. He notes that even false claims, including inaccuracies generated by AI tools about the brand, can reveal how competitors are positioning the company and inform marketing decisions.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-11
An Entrepreneur contributor writing from experience scaling a regulated payments company argues that surpassing roughly 100,000 customers does not mark the end of hard problems but the start of new, more dangerous ones. Early shortcuts in engineering, treasury, compliance and onboarding that worked at small scale begin to buckle under volume, often without warning until systems are already strained.
entrepreneur.com
· 2026-09-11
Nintendo is holding a Customer Appreciation Sale from September 13-26, offering 30% discounts on games, DLC, Amiibo and accessories across the eShop, Nintendo Store and retailers. The company says the promotion is funded partly by roughly $300 million in tariff refunds it recovered from the US government, rather than passing those refunds directly back to customers.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-10
A longtime startup operations executive with no coding background describes building an AI-powered assistant to handle administrative and organizational tasks, running it for roughly $25 daily. The project marks a shift for someone who spent two decades on the business side of startups without ever building software themselves.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-10