GoKawiil
Tech News
After the April 2025 blackout across Spain and Portugal shut down its production lines and spoiled tonnes of meat, Spanish processor Fribin lost hundreds of thousands of euros in a single incident. The company has since bought two five-megawatt-hour battery storage modules, together worth about €1.5m, partly funded by EU Next Generation grants, to keep operations running during future outages.
A storage server lost power at 00:32 UTC on 17 August 2026 and stayed offline until an engineer manually restarted it at 08:22 UTC, causing an 8-hour-15-minute outage across S3-compatible storage, the container registry, and serverless and static-site deployments. The company's status page correctly flagged the incident within three minutes, but no engineer noticed it until nearly eight hours later when someone checked the page for an unrelated reason. No customer data was lost or corrupted, though failed deployments during the window require manual re-triggering.
PicoMQ is a new messaging system that delivers durable, HTTP-accessible streams while storing data on object storage rather than dedicated disks or brokers. It lets developers create a separate stream for each use case instead of consolidating records into shared topics, with each stream independently addressable and able to scale from idle to high throughput.
A blogger built a customer analytics drilldown dashboard using only a 40MB pre-aggregated Parquet 'data cube' stored in R2, an 18KB browser-based Hyparquet reader, and HTTP range requests, avoiding any database or query engine. The demo rolled up NYC's 34-million-row 311 service request dataset into a compact cube that supports fast filtering by reading only small slices of the file at a time.
Falling costs have spurred a surge in grid-scale battery storage proposals across the US, but aging grid infrastructure and equipment shortages are causing massive backlogs. Roughly 750 gigawatts of storage capacity are now waiting for interconnection approval, with median wait times rising from about 1.5 years in 2015 to 5 years in 2025. Utilities like Con Edison and PG&E report project queues swelling by hundreds of percent, citing shortages of transformers, breakers and skilled labor.