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U.K. banks and government tech systems going down. University students in Australia struggling to complete their coursework. Homes across Europe losing access to their Ring doorbells. While you were sleeping, large parts of the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based internet went offline around the world. According to the AWS outage monitor, the problem stemmed from a misconfiguration of Domain Name System (DNS) resolution within the company’s cloud infrastructure. The problem was remedied within three hours of being encounteredby people unable to log onto Roblox or search the web with Perplexity. But the outage highlights just how much the web’s day-to-day functionality relies on the the existence of too few companies. AWS controls around a third of the market; Microsoft, through its Azure cloud service, and Google hold around another third. They are some of a handful of companies that dominate the marketand do so because of their ordinary success and smooth running of cloud infrastructure services. That success, some argue, has translated to overly concentrated control by a small number of companies of key bits of the webs infrastructure, which was always meant to be distributed and with many points of failure. The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one serviceAWSwithout planning for redundancy, says Nishanth Sastry, director of research at the University of Surreys department of computer science. It means that in the rare event of an outage from those key infrastructure providers, we see catastrophic consequences across different sectors, from gaming to government. Once again, we are experiencing how the concentration in the computing industry, in this case in cloud computing, can crash major parts of our internet, all at once, says Corinne Cath-Speth, an expert on cloud computing and head of digital at human rights organization ARTICLE 19. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism, and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies. Even those that do have multiple eggs in multiple metaphorical baskets were affected. Signal, the secure messaging app which rents cloud infrastructure from AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure, faced outages because of AWSs issues. Amazon did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for comment. That urgency needs to go to the top of governments, nevermind businesses, reckons Amandine LePape, chief operating officer and cofounder of Element, which provides secure communications to governments. Centralized systems may offer convenience and scale, but they also create single points of failure, she says. True resilience comes from decentralisation and self-hosting. That needs to be considered for the futuresimilar outages of AWS have occurred in 2020, 2021, and 2023because its likely to happen again. Governments and other organizations must rethink their infrastructure strategies now, says LePape, or risk being next in line when the cloud goes dark, especially when it comes to their communications.
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French luxury goods company Kering said Sunday it is selling its beauty division to L’Oreal for 4 billion euros ($4.66 billion).Under the agreement, Clichy, France-based L’Oreal will acquire the House of Creed high-end fragrance company as well as licenses to create beauty and fragrance products for Kering brands like Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga.The companies said they will establish a strategic committee to ensure coordination between Kering brands and L’Oréal. Kering and L’Oréal said they are also exploring joint business opportunities in the wellness and longevity market, combining L’Oreal’s innovation with Kering’s deep understanding of luxury clients.The deal has some precedence. L’Oreal acquired the beauty license for Kering’s Yves Saint Laurent brand in 2008.Luca de Meo, CEO of Paris-based Kering, said the deal combines L’Oreal’s expertise with Kering’s luxury reach.“Joining forces with the global leader in beauty, we will accelerate the development of fragrance and cosmetics for our major houses, allowing them to achieve scale in this category and unlock their immense long-term potential, as did Yves Saint Laurent Beauté under L’Oréal’s stewardship,” de Meo said in a statement.Nicolas Hieronimus, the CEO of L’Oreal Groupe, said Creed is one of the fastest growing players in the niche fragrance market, while Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga are “exceptional couture brands with enormous potential for growth.”The all-cash deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026. L’Oréal will also pay royalties to Kering for the use of its licensed brands. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer
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On a recent weekday in Aspen, Colorado, Stu Landesberg stood with a group of firefighters on a mountainside and watched a drone take off and fly toward a simulated fire. The drone detected the hotspota pile of ice, since wildfire risk was too high that day for real flamesand then aimed and blasted it with fire suppressant. The test flight was one of thousands that Landesbergs startup, Seneca, has run while operating in stealth mode over the last several months. The company officially launched today, announcing that it has raised $60 million. It aims to reshape wildfire responseand help protect wildfire-prone communities in a way that hasnt been possible until now. [Photo: courtesy Seneca] “Once I started learning about this problem, I became obsessed with it” For Landesberg, the startup represents an unexpected pivot. Since 2012, he’d led Grove, the consumer products company known for cutting plastic waste in packaging. But in late 2023, the company brought in a new CEO, former Amazon executive Jeff Yurcisin, to help it grow. Landesberg became chairman of the board, and started to think about what he wanted to take on next. I looked around at the problems that were enormousplanetary scale, he says. That list included wildfires, a challenge that he was intimately familiar with as a Californian. As fires have dramatically increased in recent years, he lost fire insurance on his own house. His father-in-laws house also went through a fire. The wildfire crisis keeps growing. Fires are now burning eight times more land in the West each year than they did in the mid-1980s. In 2020 alone, 4.3 million acres burned in California, an area larger than the entire state of Connecticut and most of Rhode Island. Insurers are hiking rates in the state or pulling out of some areas completely; a state-run last-resort insurance plan is struggling. If you lose your fire insurance, you can’t get a mortgage, Landesberg says. And if you can’t get a mortgage, what is going to happen to the American West? If we want to continue living in the American West, we absolutely have to figure out a way to live there without our communities being at risk of burning down. Its not just California. Texas experienced its largest fire in state history last year, covering a million acres. In the Great Plains, fires are happening more often than in the past, and covering more area. Places that previously werent as likely to burn, like Quebec and other parts of Canada, are increasingly catching fire. Last fall, as parts of the East Coast saw record drought, fires spread across New Jersey and Massachusetts. Globally, nearly a billion acres burned last year. Climate change will keep making the problem worse. Once I started learning about this problem, I became obsessed with it, Landesberg says. More than 100 million Americans are living at risk of fire, he explains: Its one of those things that until you really study it, you don’t quite realize just how big the problem is. . . . It costs the U.S. economy something like a trillion dollars a year. [Photo: courtesy Seneca] A new type of fire response In early 2024, Landesberg dove into research. He rode along with firefighters, studied fire science, and began conversations with potential partners. He also looked at other tech under development. The world of fire tech is quickly growing: after Silicon Valley choked on smoke from the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, California in 2018, and the sky in San Francisco turned orange from smoke in 2020, several other founders also began exploring how technology could help. Some of those solutions are in use now. Pano AI, which uses cameras and AI to detect smoke and alert firefighters, now has hundreds of cameras monitoring more than 50 million acres around the world. (In one example of its use, when lightning struck a remote mountain in Colorado last year, the system was the only source to report the fire. It gave firefighters coordinates in minutes, and helicopters and ground crews were able to stop the blaze.) BurnBot, another startup, helps safely burn dry vegetation to create fire breaks. Landesberg saw an opportunity for new tech to help with another part of the challengehow to help firefighters quickly respond when a fire begins. If you talk to many of the chiefs on the front lines in the most high-risk communities, they will tell you that its all about catching the fire when its small, he says. In hard to reach areas like a steep California canyon, helicopters are often the fastest way to reach a fire. But because theyre very expensive, their numbers are limited. When conditions are at their worst and many fires are happening simultaneously, a helicopter might not be available. High winds and poor visibility at night can also stop helicopters from flying. In some cases, when trucks can’t reach a fire, fire crews have to hike to remote areas on foot. By the fall of 2024, Landesberg and his founding partners had decided to build drones that could autonomously navigate to fires and suppress them. (Some other startups are working on related solutions, like Dryad, which also makes technology to detect firs.) They started building prototypes. By early 2025, they were testing the drones with fire agencies. [Photo: courtesy Seneca] How the technology works The drones are designed to fly in strike teams of five aircraft, each carrying 100 pounds of fire suppressant. Fire agencies and utilities could station them in remote areas, so they’re ready to fly autonomously as soon as a fire is detected. The swarm of drones can spray a line of firefighting foam that’s around three feet wide and 1,280 feet longenough to stop or meaningfully slow a fire. Then they can fly back to their base, reload, and return. One selling point of the drones is that they can fly closer to a fire than a helicopter or plane could, and target an exact position on the ground. “You kind of get one shot with a helicopter, whereas with drones, you can lay patterns and lines and just do that more precisely,” says Bill Clerico, founder of Convective Capital, a wildfire-focused VC firm that co-led the startup’s fundraising round. Drones are at the right stage in development for this type of application. “We’re at this interesting inflection point in drone technology where the batteries are getting much better, the motors are getting much better, they’re getting lighter, they can carry much more,” Clerico says. They’re also far less expensive than the helicopters that are currently used. The company hasn’t shared exact costs, but Landesberg says that a group of five drones will be in the high hundreds of thousands or low seven figures; operating a helicopter is also extremely expensive, whereas drones run at a marginal cost. “It’s totally clear that aerial suppression needs to be part of the solution and part of the future,” Landesberg says. “It’s also totally clear that the cost of today’s aerial suppression apparatus is incredibly highso high that it means you can’t get enough of them. Our intention is to build something that can be low enough cost that you can station them remotely and dedicate them to fast response in a high-risk area.” In conditions where a fire moves very quicklylike a hot, windy day after months of droughtreaching a fire even minutes earlier could help stop the spread. Drones could also be used to support fire crews during controlled burns. The company’s goal is audacious: to eliminate the risk of wildfire across 500 million acres in the U.S. and other countries by 2035. When I ask if that’s even possible in a world made so much more flammable by climate change, Landesberg says that it simply has to be done. “I think it has to be solved,” he says. “I think there’s two options: either we give up or we believe that we can do it. There is no middle ground.” Later, he adds that he believes society is at an inflection point where it can build the technology to create a resilient future. “I’m optimistic, perpetually, because I don’t think there’s any other way to be,” he says. “It’s not that I think the problem is going to get easier. I just think we have to acknowledge it’s going to get harder and we have to work.” [Photo: courtesy Seneca] Getting in the air As Seneca’s team worked on the design of the drones, they worked closely with fire agencies to vet the approach. “One of the really wonderful things about having been a consumer founder first is that I think Seneca has incredible ‘listen to your customer’ DNA,” Landesberg says. The team also includes former firefighters. After test flights with agencies in different states, they kept iterating. The foam pump, for example, was initially designed at an angle based on typical California fires. But after meeting with fire departments Montana and Wyoming, where fires from lightning strikes are more common, they realized that the nozzle needed to also be able to point downward at the base of a fire. Now it can adjust as needed. The drones have gone through extensive testing, including hundreds of missions on live fires, and now the company plans to test final edge cases before shipping the product next year. It “needs to be perfectly hardened before we hand it off to an operator that we fully expect to be using this in mission critical environments,” says Landesberg. Fire agencies are often slow to adopt new technology, but have been enthusiastic so far. “There’s a joke in the fire service that it’s 300 years of tradition unimpeded by progress,” says Clerico. “It’s a very traditional culture. That said, I think in wildland firefighting there’s a broad acknowledgment that the current tools we have are not working and we need to try new things. The crisis has reached a breaking point and people are willing to try new stuff. So it feels like the right time to build this company.” Because of the immense economic damage from wildfireshomes are losing value, insurance companies have lost hundreds of billions, the utility company PG&E went through bankruptcy, governments spend billions fighting firesthere’s also huge demand for solutions that could work. “This is a big betthat these technologies will work well and be deployed at scale,” says Clerico. “There’s certainly risk in that. But if it works, it could be an absolutely enormous company. These Seneca stations could be at every utility substation and every fire station in the West.”
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E-Commerce
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