*Customers dressed in an assortment of costumes fill the cafe, the line to the counter treacherously long as Dashboard serves up eerily misty drinks over the counter. A DJ plays Halloween music from the makeshift stage, and people sway to the beats or chat with each other while carving pumpkins.

For the quiet cafe, the current atmosphere is slightly overwhelming.

Dashboard smiles brightly at you with false vampire teeth when you finally approach the front of the line, the barista’s costume disheveled from a long day’s work.*

Velcome to Vandith and Vrew: Vhere ve serve your scroll vuel, no matter vow you take your vrew. 

*You narrow your eyes, not understanding what the barista said with the fake vampire accent. Dashboard sighs.*

So much for that acting class. 

Welcome to Bandwidth and Brew: Where we serve your scroll fuel, no matter how you take your brew!

Where’s your costume?

*You look down on your normal clothes and shrug.*

Oh?

I suppose I never let you know about the Halloween party, then. 

Well, fear not: with my terrifying list of brews, I’ve got enough Halloween spirit to share!

This week was especially full of glorious frights.

On Oct. 19, minutes after the museum opened, four thieves stole priceless gems at the Louvre in France. 

The heist- done in broad daylight- resulted in nine priceless pieces of jewelry missing from the most visited museum in the world.

50 detectives have been recruited to find the four thieves still at large. According to an FBI agent, the thieves left behind a lot of evidence and they are certain that the thieves will be found.

Though, you do have to give the thieves some credit for the audacious heist. Robbing a museum in the middle of broad daylight would be no easy task.

The thieves were dressed up as construction workers, and so many people assumed that the four of them were simply working on construction at the Louvre. Talk about a convincing costume!

Would you like me to serve this thrilling brew to you?

Or I could serve you a brew that left many people with a good scare?

*Interest piqued, you ask Dashboard to share the other option with you.*

Many people had a fright on Monday morning when they logged into many of their favorite or essential platforms and found that their platforms had crashed. Platforms like Venmo, Zoom, Snapchat, Reddit, and even Fortnite were all being impacted by what was one, big problem.

Amazon Web Services- or AWS- experienced an internet outage on Monday forcing workers from London to Tokyo offline and making everyday tasks- like joining a Zoom call- difficult for many users. 

The internet outage originated in AWS’s Virginia cluster and allegedly was due to “an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers.”  

What’s particularly spooky about the scenario is how vulnerable our interconnected networks are, and the massive chaos that even brief outages can cause. This was the biggest disruption since the Crowdstrike disruption last year that impacted hospitals and airports, and it’s shocking how much we rely on such fragile infrastructures.

What do you say? Can I serve this to you?

*You nod, trying to recall if you had any disruption to your regular programs on Monday. Dashboard turns and begins to fill a glass with dry ice, causing the soda the barista pours into the cup to mist like a potion. Dashboard reaches over and hands you the glass.*

It’s rootbeer.

Here you go: I know you like your telecommunications new piping hot- but just try something else this week.

And don’t drink the dry ice until it’s dissolved.