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The Pulse: Firebase’s global outage & poor response

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com original

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.

Today, we cover:

  1. Firebase: global outage & poor handling by Google. The Firebase iOS SDK crashed after a backend change, crashing all apps which used Firebase analytics for 2-6 hours. Google did not update the status page or offer any postmortem, which is a head-scratcher from a company known for standout incident management practices.

  2. OpenAI’s platform play from AWS playbook? OpenAI is becoming a platform where it’s possible to allocate ChatGPT spend on open models and AI offerings from among 16 partners, not just OpenAI models. It’s fair to ask if Anthropic will consider a similar platform play.

  3. More data on companies moving to open models. Vercel’s AI gateway shows 60% of model spend goes to open weight models, and OpenRouter also shows open models are being more used than closed ones.

  4. Why CTOs and VPEs are quitting en masse: another take. What if it’s not “founder mode”, but about people who love building software, feeling like they can do it solo (or with a small team) with AI tools?