Heena Sharma Blog

  E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc's online store was grappling with widespread outages on Sunday night, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector, the second broad disruption to services since late June. Its online store showed error messages on several regional domains. Reuters could not access product listing on its domains including, the United States, India, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Singapore. "We're sorry that some customers may be experiencing issues while shopping. We appreciate your patience as we work to resolve the issue," an Amazon spokesperson said. As of 0400 GMT, some of the domains were back up. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the extent of the recovery in services. More than 38,000 user reports indicated issues with Amazon's online store site, while nearly 500 users reported problems with the Amazon Web Services, according to Downdetector. Read More

Soon, rural India may have access to broadband services through cable networks. To boost rural internet connectivity, the ministry of information and broadcasting and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) proposed to provide broadband services through existing cable networks. According to ministry officials, the move has the potential to provide internet connectivity to nearly 190 million households that have television sets. A Times of India report says that about 100 million homes already have cable TV subscription. Trai chairman R S Sharma said that such a move can increase internet connectivity through fixed line networks from the existing 7 per cent, against the global average of 46 per cent. During the mid-December meeting of the ministry and TRAI with service providers, Sharma cited the instance of South Korea, which has implemented a similar proposal. For it to be implemented, the proposal will now be whetted on the financial implications of a