Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, March 3

• Snap Shares Leap 44% in Debut as Investors Doubt Value Will Vanish: Snapchat is a business built in large part on disappearing messages and adding animated dog ears and flower crowns to users’ selfies. As of Thursday, that business is worth about $34 billion — more than the market value of the old-line media company CBS, and about three times the size of another social media company, Twitter. Snapchat has made paper billionaires of its 20-something founders five times over. In making its stock market debut in spectacular fashion — its shares rising 44 percent on their first day of trading — Snapchat’s parent, Snap Inc., has blazed a trail for other technology darlings like Uber and Spotify that remain privately held. It elated Wall Street institutions eager for a prominent initial public offering when few had surfaced for months. The company has entranced investors despite a litany of red flags, like enormous losses that are expected to persist for years, a slowdown in its once-vaunted user growth rates, and an ownership structure that gives Snapchat’s founders control for decades to come.

• Amazon’s massive AWS outage was caused by human error: Amazon today blamed human error for the the big AWS outage that took down a bunch of large internet sites for several hours on Tuesday afternoon. In a blog post, the company said that one of its employees was debugging an issue with the billing system and accidentally took more servers offline than intended. That error started a domino effect that took down two other server subsystems and so on and so on. “Removing a significant portion of the capacity caused each of these systems to require a full restart,” the post read. “While these subsystems were being restarted, S3 was unable to service requests. Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.” In response, the company said it is making some changes to ensure that a similar human error wouldn’t have as large an impact. One is that the tool employees use to remove server capacity will no longer allow them to remove as much as quickly as they previously could. Amazon also said it is making changes to prevent the AWS Service Health Dashboard — the webpage that shows which AWS services are operating normally and not — from stopping working in the event of a similar occurrence.