Cisco’s ThousandEyes internet monitoring unit on Monday unveiled new artificial intelligence-powered capabilities it said will allow for much faster prediction and diagnosis of internet outages and disruptions.
The company said its new AI tech, called Digital Experience Assurance, or DXA, would enable customers of Cisco’s networking technology to introduce the ability to automatically act on issues in their network quality.
This is opposed to what is currently the case with ThousandEyes’ software, where customers mostly only monitor their IT infrastructure for network issues.
‘Google Maps of the internet’
Cisco ThousandEyes terms itself the “Google Maps” of the internet. That’s because it has a broad, end-to-end view of every user and any application over any network.
Founded 15 years ago, the company says it’s been investing lots into AI in the past several years.
But now, ThousandEyes is making big, AI-focused changes to its platform aimed at giving its client base even more visibility over network quality and resilience.
Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager of ThousandEyes, said DXA would provide the ability “not only to resolve issues before they begin to impact my users, but leverage broad data to actually begin to predict and give forward intelligence on what might happen across infrastructure, to proactively address it before it begins to significantly degrade overall digital experiences.”
“Digital experience assurance helps to build upon this evolutionary journey beyond metrics, beyond monitoring, towards a platform that delivers on a closed loop system,” Vaccaro told CNBC in an exclusive interview ahead of the Monday Cisco Live event in Las Vegas.
Among the other capabilities, DXA comes with are the ability for businesses to correlate, analyze, diagnose, predict, optimize, and remediate with little or no manual intervention.
Cisco ThousandEyes says its platform is powered by over 650 billion daily measurements collected from around the globe. The firm committed to giving businesses visibility into their internal environments, including on-premises networks and cloud environments.
The product builds on Cisco ThousandEyes’ Event Detection tech, which the company says already reduces the time taken to detect a disruption event to mere minutes and less staffing, rather than hours and multiple engineers.
AI-generated internet status reports
Vaccaro also teased the development of a new product at Cisco ThousandEyes that, once complete, would enable users to generate AI-create scripts showing the status of global ISP (internet service provider), public cloud, and edge service networks, or an application’s connection a network.
This is similar to what ThousandEyes currently offers for internet monitoring, but with AI automatically doing the work rather than people.
“That is in development and should be seeing the light of day here in the very, very near future,” Vaccaro told CNBC.
The product would incorporate large language models, which are considered the bedrock of generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
Racking up 100 million users to date, ChatGPT was catapulted into global virality just months after its creator OpenAI released it. The app’s success stoked massive hype around artificial intelligence, with companies of all stripes making developments of their own in the space.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
AMD CEO Lisa Su unveils the AMD vision for Advancing Al.
Courtesy: AMD
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices rose nearly 9% on Monday after analysts at Piper Sandler lifted their price target on the stock on optimism about the chipmaker’s latest product announcement.
The analysts said they see a snapback for AMD’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, in the fourth quarter. That’s when they expect the chipmaker to be through the bulk of the $800 million in charges that AMD said it would incur as a result of a new U.S. license requirement that applies to exports of semiconductors to China and other countries.
Last week, AMD revealed its next-generation artificial intelligence chips, the Instinct MI400 series. Notably, the company unveiled a full-server rack called Helios that enables thousands of the chips to be tied together. That chip system is expected to be important for AI customers such as cloud companies and developers of large language models.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the products on stage at an event in San Jose, California, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said they sounded “totally crazy.”
“Overall, we are enthused with the product launches at the AMD event this week, specifically the Helios rack, which we think is pivotal for AMD Instinct growth,” the analysts wrote in their note.
Piper Sandler raised its price target for AMD’s share price from $125 to $140.
The stock jumped past $126 on Monday to close at its highest level since Jan. 7, before President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs and AMD warned of the chip control charges.