Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts say

It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.

The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients.

A computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords. Plus, more from around the puzzleverse

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When the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it was an early victory for artificial intelligence over the human mind, and the culmination of decades of attempts. Almost 30 years later, a computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords.

Earlier this month, a model called Darmok solved the final puzzle of the Times’s annual cryptic crossword competition about three minutes faster than Liam Hughes, 29, who became the contest’s youngest (human) winner.

Wolf trap missing its lowest crosspiece? (5)”

Proportion of inspiration and perspiration? It’s roughly 45% and 42% (5)

Kick-off leads to decisive early goal for PSG (5)

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Is your television listening to every conversation? Filling your home with highly invasive ads? Some viewers have had enough of tech violating their privacy

When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to do was watch over-the-air TV, play a DVD or stream something from my computer.”

Some may accuse Dan of being a luddite, but his master’s degree in computer science and decades of experience in telecommunications would suggest otherwise. “The tech is not intimidating,” he explains, “just increasingly enshittified.”

Low-cost broadband provider Jio Platforms aims for £81bn valuation when it floats on the stock market on Wednesday

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India’s second-richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is launching what could be the country’s biggest-ever initial public offering (IPO), despite a stock market downturn.

Mumbai-based Jio Platforms, a telecoms company backed by Meta Platforms and Google, is hoping to raise up to 302bn rupees (£2.4bn) and is targeting a 10.3tn rupees valuation when it floats on the stock market from Wednesday.

I have long known that internet detritus is bad for me. But with microdramas – stories told in episodes under two minutes – I can actually feel the damage being done

Seven or eight years ago, a new kind of televisual entertainment was born in China. Microdramas: over-the-top, soap opera-type series with splashy, schlocky premises such as infidelity, arranged marriage and secret billionairehood, in which each episode is a mere 60-90 seconds long, took off there among an audience of the phone-addicted.

And now, as with many cultural phenomena that start in China, microdramas have made it over here. The form is forecast to take in $1.5bn in revenue in the US by the end of this year. Channel 4 announced recently that it was launching its first microdrama, and the UK is already leading Europe in terms of microdrama-watching, with 8.2 million of us tuning in to these things every month.

Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist

Apparent attempt to hack Rade Bajić’s iPhone comes amid efforts to undermine landmark criminal case

A Serbian prosecutor who investigated the authorities’ allegedly illegal scheme to help the Trumps build a tower in Belgrade has been targeted with advanced spyware, expert analysis indicates.

The finding suggests a disturbing new element in the authoritarian Serbian regime’s campaign to undermine what is believed to be the first criminal case related to global moneymaking drive of the US president’s family, which critics describe as a “pay to play” scheme trading the Trump administration’s favour for business opportunities.

Google apologises after suffering a major Cloud outage in its London region that caused problems at banks, Revolut, and court video cameras

The pound has rallied after Britain’s unemployment rate fell unexpectedly this morning to 4.7%.

Sterling has gained half a cent against the US dollar to $1.3352, as the City welcomes the news that employment rose in the last quarter.

“This data has caught the market on the hop, with traders scrambling to respond and boost exposure to the pound. Good news has been a touch more prevalent for the UK of late, which is just the kind of framing the government needs heading into the budget, though signs of more resilience in the labour market do of course mean the BoE has more room to respond to higher inflation.”

“The labour market remains relatively flat overall. This resilience in the face of headwinds driven by global events is welcome. But underlying problems remain, with around one million young people not in education, employment or training and overall employment more than two million short of the Government’s 80% employment rate target.

To fix those challenges we need to change the benefit system so it offers active help to all who need it, but also make it easier for employers to create jobs. “

As a freaky Val Kilmer doppelganger stars in a new western and faux starlet Tilly Norwood is set for her feature debut, experts are split on whether mainstream adoption is a long way down the line – or just around the corner

‘Don’t fear the dead – and don’t fear me.” An exact facsimile of a young Val Kilmer, not quite dead and not quite alive, utters that baiting line in the trailer for the new western As Deep as the Grave. Director Coerte Voorhees knows exactly what he is doing – this is an AI-created version of the late actor, approved by his family but bringing with it a heap of controversy about whether such technology could make flesh-and-blood thespians redundant.

Not just yet, judging by the extended glimpse of the film released earlier this year: it looks like a thirtysomething Kilmer, if a robot version had been sent back to the 1920s American wilderness by Skynet and, as well as being strangely rigid, had forgotten to download his voice, let alone his signature air of spacey shrewdness. Kilmer’s estate signed off on it, citing his enthusiasm for new technology that expands storytelling, but surely he would have been dismayed by this freaky doppelganger.

Great hardware let down by software flaws on these pricey machines that combine ChromeOS with Android

Google’s attempt to create a new type of laptop to compete with Windows and macOS machines is finally here, combining the best of ChromeOS and Android into the new Googlebook. With advanced links to Android phones and the best of Google built in, can these Googlebooks really compete with a MacBook Air or Surface Laptop? I took two for a spin to find out.

For years, Chromebooks have been the boss of budget laptops, but Googlebooks take a different, far more premium approach. Made by a range of traditional PC makers, including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo, they start at £999 (€1,099/$899/A$2,299) – a far cry from the £160 Chromebooks.

The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost

Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.

In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist