5 Companies That Had A Rough Week

For the week ending June 7, CRN looks at IT companies that were unfortunate, unsuccessful or just didn't make good decisions.

The Week Ending June 7

Topping this week's roundup of those having a rough week is Google, which spent the week fixing and dealing with the aftermath of a major system outage of its cloud services.

Also making the list this week is Cloudera, whose CEO announced his departure after a poor financial forecast and a precipitous decline in the company's stock price. Quest Diagnostics and Tech Data both scrambled to handle data security failures, while Apple learned that it could be the target of a U.S. Department of Justice anti-trust investigation.

Not everyone in the IT industry was having a rough go of it this week. For a rundown of companies that made smart decisions, executed savvy strategic moves – or just had good luck – check out this week's Five Companies That Came To Win roundup.

Google Hit By Widespread Cloud Services Outage

Google Cloud services, including Gmail and YouTube, along with a number of third-party services that rely on the Google Cloud Platform, were running slow or completely dark for more than four hours Sunday.

Starting around 3:00 p.m. ET Sunday users were unable to access Google Cloud services such as Gmail, G Suite and YouTube, along with other services including Snapchat, Shopify and Discord, because of the problem. Some users of Google's Nest smart-home services were unable to unlock their homes to get in or turn on their air conditioning, according to a Fast Company report.

Google initially blamed network congestion in the eastern U.S. for the problem. On Tuesday the company said a system configuration change, which was slated for a small number of servers in a single region, was incorrectly applied to a larger number of servers in several neighboring regions, leading to a network capacity crunch.

On Monday morning, the day after the service disruption, investors punished Google by dropping the value of its stock by nearly 7 percent in the first hour of trading.

Cloudera Stock Plummets After Poor Financial Report, CEO Departure

It was a tough week for big data and Hadoop technology developer Cloudera after the company reported fiscal 2020 first quarter sales that fell short of expectations and reduced its forecast for all of fiscal 2020 to $745 million to $765 million, down from an earlier forecast of $835 million to $855 million.

The financial results were accompanied by the news that Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly will retire next month after he and the company's board agreed that the time was right for a leadership transition.

The stream of bad news caused the price of Cloudera's stock to plummet more than 38 percent from its Wednesday close of $8.81 per share to a Thursday morning opening of $5.43 per share.

Quest Diagnostics Breach Exposes Sensitive Data From 11.9 Million Patients

Quest Diagnostics disclosed Monday that a potential breach of the payment web page of its billings collection vendor exposed financial and medical information from 11.9 million patients.

The Secaucus, N.J.-based clinical laboratory services provider said that between Aug. 1, 2018 and March 30, 2019 an unauthorized user had access to the American Medical Collection Agency system containing information that AMCA had received from Quest Diagnostics and others.

The exposed data included medical information, financial information such as credit card numbers and bank account information, and even personal information like Social Security numbers.

Tech Data Scrambles To Fix Leak That Exposed Reseller Payment Information

Quest Diagnostics wasn't the only company working through data exposure issues this week. Distributor Tech Data had to fix a major data leak in its StreamOne cloud marketplace server that exposed payment, invoice, account and contact information for the company's reseller and MSP partners.

The system vulnerability leaked some 264 gigabytes of customer and employee corporate and personal data, providing access to Tech Data's client servers, invoices, SAP integrations and plain-text passwords, according to a pair of security researchers at vpnMentor.

Tech Data said it fixed the problem on Tuesday within hours of being notified and said there was no indication that the exposed data had been used in any unauthorized transactions or other fraudulent way.

Apple Could Be Target Of U.S. Antitrust Probe

The U.S. Justice Department Antitrust Division could be readying an investigation of Apple, according to a report out this week.

While it's not clear what specific activity the government agency may be set to investigate, Apple has been under fire from consumers and competitors who charge that its App Store practices constitute anticompetitive behavior.

Reuters reported this week that the DoJ Antitrust Division was given jurisdiction over the Apple probe as part of a broader review by that agency and the Federal Trade Commission over possible anti-trust investigations against several of the world's largest tech companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon.