From a major Vonage outage to Intercom’s rebrand, here are extracts from some of this week’s most popular news stories.
Vonage’s 36-Hour SMS Outage Exposes a Single Point of Failure
When a fire tore through a NorthC data center in Almere, Netherlands, on the morning of May 7, the damage extended well beyond the building.
Vonage customers lost access to the SMS infrastructure powering some of their most critical customer-facing workflows – including identity verification, outbound notifications, and two-way messaging – and many of them stayed down for over 36 hours.
Vonage has since published an explanation. In an official blog post, the company confirmed that “a fire at a data center belonging to one of our partners resulted in a total loss of connectivity for the infrastructure hosted at that location, impacting some of our messaging services.”
This sounds straightforward enough, but buried in the same update is the line that should give enterprise CX leaders pause:
“The vast majority of impacted customers had service restored within several hours as we rerouted them to an alternate data center.”
If rerouting to an alternate data center was the fix, why did it take more than 36 hours to get there for a portion of customers? (Read more…).
IMF Warning on Claude Mythos Indicates AI Could Turn Financial CRM Into a Systemic Cyber Risk
The IMF is sounding the alarm about the cybersecurity risk that AI poses to the financial services sector, citing Anthropic’s recent controlled release of its Claude Mythos Preview, which comes at a time when CRM systems are becoming more deeply embedded into financial institutions.
The Claude Mythos large language model (LLM) has been able to find and exploit vulnerabilities in major operating systems and web browsers, and Anthropic has given vendors like Microsoft early access to the model to help patch such security flaws.
In an IMF blog post, Tobias Adrian, Tamas Gaidosch, and Rangachary Ravikumar warned that:
“This foreshadows how fast‑moving, AI‑driven cyber risks could destabilize the financial system if not managed carefully, and why authorities must focus on building resilience through supervision and coordination—rather than treating these developments as purely technical or operational issues.”
The post added that while AI is transforming how the financial system deals with vulnerabilities and reacts to incidents, “it is also amplifying cyber threats that can undermine financial stability when the offensive capabilities of intruders outpace defenses.”
The institution’s analysis indicates that severe cyber incidents could create funding strains and disrupt wider financial markets (Read more…).
Intercom Rebrands to Fin as AI Agent Becomes the Core Business
Intercom has officially changed its company name to Fin.
The rebrand, announced on May 12, took effect immediately, with the Intercom name continuing as the label for the company’s customer service software platform, while the corporate identity now sits with its AI customer agent product.
The logic here isn’t particularly difficult to follow. Fin, Intercom’s AI agent, has been the company’s primary product for the past three years and was frequently promoted without the Intercom name attached to it at all.
The company name is now simply catching up.
What makes the announcement especially interesting, however, is CEO Eoghan McCabe’s explanation for why it took this long, and what it says about brand perception in a fast-moving AI market.
In a candid blog post, McCabe wrote:
“I actually think that the relative success of the newcomers in our category, despite the fact that we have provably superior technology, is a result of the fact that they have no baggage.”
“They don’t need to convince anyone of their new position in the market, because they never had an old one.”
Read the full article to find out more.
Cisco Cuts 4,000 Jobs – But is Webex Contact Center Safe?
Cisco just reported its best quarterly revenue on record. On the same day, it announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs.
The company’s Q3 2026 earnings results showed $15.8 billion in revenue – up 12% year over year – with double-digit growth on both the top and bottom lines.
This is undoubtedly a strong quarter on paper. But running alongside the earnings release was a restructuring announcement that, for Cisco’s contact center and collaboration customers, potentially raises some uncomfortable questions.
In a blog published in conjunction with the results, Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO of Cisco, confirmed the cuts directly:
“We are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than five percent of our total employee base.”
Robbins was at pains to frame this as strategy rather than stress. “The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest,” he wrote (Read more…).
