UpdraftPlus key attacks, a Google Cloud outage and WordPress 7.2

Google Cloud’s London zone goes down after a “power event”

A power event knocked out the europe-west2-b zone in Google Cloud’s London region on 20 October. Downtime started at 06:08 UTC. Google said it was mitigated and aimed for full recovery by 13:00 UTC.

Services hit included Cloud Run, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and Filestore. Lloyds, HSBC, Revolut, Royal Mail, Rightmove and DPD all had problems. During recovery, Google warned that customers might not be able to create new workloads.

Why it matters One zone failed, but many big brands went down with it. If your site or app runs in one zone, spread it across two or three zones. Make sure that spare capacity is running before trouble starts, because you may not be able to add it during an outage.

Read the full story on The Register

WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 is due, with a Secrets API and text shadows

WordPress 7.2 Beta 1 is scheduled for 20 October, and the final release is set for 9 December. The test team has published a long list of features to try. The biggest one for developers is a new Secrets API, a standard place to store API keys with libsodium encryption.

Designers get text gradients, text shadows and form styling in Global Styles. Galleries can set columns per screen size. The admin menu swaps Dashicons for SVG icons, and a new default theme called Ipsum arrives. Animated GIF and WebP images now stay animated in their smaller sizes.

Why it matters Plugins that keep API keys in plain options can move to a safer home. Test your plugins and theme on a staging site or WordPress Playground, never on your live site.

Read the full story on Make WordPress

Cloudflare’s tsrs checks TypeScript up to 8 times faster

Cloudflare and VoidZero released tsrs on 20 October, an experimental port of the TypeScript compiler to Rust. They say it is up to 8 times faster than TypeScript 7.0 and uses about 70% less memory.

Cloudflare says “we are not forking TypeScript”. The work happens with the TypeScript team, inside the Oxc toolchain. Some fixes have already gone back into the official Go version. There are still small differences, like the order of error messages.

Why it matters Type checks are often the slowest step in a build. You can try it today with npx tsrs. Keep the official compiler in CI until tsrs is stable. I’d try it on a big project first, where the wait hurts most.

Read the full story on the Cloudflare blog

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity still can’t read JavaScript pages

Glenn Gabe repeated his AI rendering test on 19 October, 434 days after the first one. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity failed every test. They could not read main content that loads with JavaScript.

Gemini passed all three tests, and Copilot passed two. Copilot failed on a WebGL parallax site. Gabe notes that even Gemini and Copilot missed content on some pages.

Why it matters If your text loads with JavaScript, many AI tools see a blank page. Put your important content in the HTML with server rendering. My guide on how AI search finds your site covers the basics.

I think single-page apps need server rendering more than ever. They can look great to people and empty to bots.

Read the full story on GSQi

John Mueller: pick one form for square brackets in URLs

Google’s John Mueller says square brackets in URLs can cause problems inside Google, Search Engine Roundtable reported on 20 October. Under the URL standard, ?filter[]=123 and ?filter%5B%5D=123 are two different URLs.

Mueller expects these URLs to keep working. But he said he would not build a new site that way, because “the web is messy”. Google may merge the two forms, but you shouldn’t count on it.

Why it matters Filter pages on shops often use brackets. Use one form everywhere: internal links, canonical tags and sitemaps. My canonical URLs guide shows how.

Read the full story on Search Engine Roundtable

Meta drops AI training from its crawler terms, but keeps crawling

Meta has removed AI training from the crawling clause in its new Commercial Terms, Search Engine Journal reported on 19 October. The terms start on 30 October. Meta can still crawl websites linked to businesses that advertise with it.

The new clause ties crawling to ads, business tools and security. It no longer mentions robots.txt. Meta runs separate crawlers for AI training and for Meta AI search.

Why it matters You can block one Meta crawler and allow another. Check your robots.txt rules for each Meta crawler before 30 October. A legal expert notes that robots.txt is a request, not a legal right.

Read the full story on Search Engine Journal

OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra now writes COBOL and Fortran well

OpenAI shared new results on 19 October for coding in rare languages like COBOL, Fortran, Visual Basic and OCaml. On its new MultiLangBench test, GPT-6 Astra passed 87.4% of tests across 20 languages. GPT-5.6 Sol managed 26.8%.

COBOL jumped from 10.9% to 72.1%. In a COBOL migration test, GPT-6.1 Sol kept the program’s behaviour 86.6% of the time at low effort, and 97.9% at higher effort. OpenAI put the test suite on GitHub.

Why it matters Old code is often the scariest part of a business. AI can now help move it to modern languages. Write tests for the old system first, so you can prove the new code does the same job.

Read the full story on OpenAI

Nvidia’s Nemotron 3.5 open models run AI agents on your PC

Nvidia launched new open-weight Nemotron 3.5 models on 19 October. Super VL has 120 billion parameters and is built for company agents on their own servers. Bolt 74B-A9B handles tool calls, reasoning and web browsing on AI PCs with RTX Spark and on DGX Spark workstations.

Both are available now. A smaller model, Bolt E4B, is due later in October for chat agents.

Why it matters Local agents keep your files and client data on your own machine. Check the licence and your hardware before you swap out a cloud API.

Read the full story on TechCrunch

Apple confirms its “Pro and Tell” event for 28 October

Apple has made it official. Its “Pro and Tell” event is on 28 October at 10 am Pacific time in Los Angeles. That is 4 am on 29 October in Melbourne. Apple has not promised a normal livestreamed keynote.

The rumoured headline is a touchscreen MacBook Pro with an OLED screen. An entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac with the M6 chip are also expected, plus an OLED iPad mini. Apple hasn’t confirmed any of these.

Why it matters If touch arrives on the Mac, desktop visitors will start tapping your site. Make buttons and menus big enough for a finger, not only a mouse.

Read the full story on Cult of Mac