Updated Verizon sent a big chunk of the internet down a black hole this morning – and caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others – after it wrongly accepted a network misconfiguration from a small ISP in Pennsylvania, USA.

For nearly three hours, web traffic that was supposed to go to some of the biggest names online was instead accidentally rerouted through a steel giant based in Pittsburgh.

It all started when new internet routes for more than 20,000 IP address prefixes – roughly two per cent of the internet – were wrongly announced by regional US ISP DQE

The UK Home Office has extended its Emergency Services Network contract with Motorola, intended to shift blue-light services to 4G.

The move signals further delays to an already troubled programme.

In the contract award notice published this week, the department said it was extending the deal until December 2024. That will run one year later than previously intended at an additional cost of £82m, totalling £401m.

Under the new deal, the programme will adopt Motorola's off-the-shelf Kodiak product to provide the "push-to-talk" application on devices to work on the ESN.

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The department said in its notice: "There is

On Call As you shut down and wait for Windows or macOS to spend the usual hour installing updates before your weekend can begin, spare a thought for those on the other end of the phone in The Register 's weekly On Call column.

A reader, who we shall call "David", was reminded by our Away Team episode of his own data centre drama a little closer to home.

David was putting in the hours on a temporary contract for a nameless call centre provider north of the border. Naturally, keeping the phones going was a priority so the helpdesk

Huawei's public relations onslaught continued today with a "panel discussion" between the company's founder Ren Zhenfei, blockchain blowhard George Gilder and MIT Media Lab co-founder and non-stop tech panellist Nicholas Negroponte.

It was a strange mixture of a terrible TED discussion and the outlining of a Communist Party Five-Year Plan.

The two aged futurists, before a backdrop of magnified library shelves, both took issue with recent US action against their gracious hosts at Huawei.

Negroponte described the issue as cultural rather than political, saying technological progress relies on collaboration as much as competition to benefit science and knowledge.

Hongmeng, there's