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.
