from the $85-million-Super-Bowl-ad-defeated-by-Google's-free-tier-rate-limits dept.
The campaign allegedly cost $15 million for the ads, $70 million for the domain name.
AI.com bought its way onto the biggest advertising stage in the world on Sunday night, running a fourth-quarter Super Bowl ad spot that told tens of millions of sports fans worldwide to head to the site and create a handle. Hyped-up viewers arrived in droves, and then the site crashed.
Within minutes of the ad airing, users across social platforms reported that AI.com was either unreachable or stuck in failed sign-up loops, turning what was meant to be the site's big launch moment into an unexpected stress test that failed right before the eyes of millions. The company soon restored its service, but first impressions count.
In a post on X.com, co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek, best known as the CEO of Crypto.com, said that the company had "prepared for scale, but not for THIS," later attributing the disruption to external factors outside the company's control. Marszalek later wrote that the website was "hitting Google rate limits (which are at their absolute global maximum)."
(Score: 4, Touché) by Gaaark on Tuesday February 10, @11:41PM (5 children)
You have to give them a credit card number, but "We won't place a charge on it", or something like that.
Yeah... i trust them...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 4, Touché) by aafcac on Wednesday February 11, @12:32AM (3 children)
Practices like that should really be illegal when there's a way of pausing service until payment is made. The whole business model depends on people forgetting that they signed up and being charged without proper consent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @09:32AM (2 children)
This is what Apple does. You can create a new account, but you can't download apps from the store or actually do anything useful until it is registered. Registration requires a credit card. They claim that this counts as a 'transaction' and is therefore legal. According to our laws it is not. Our privacy laws state that you can only gather information required. Apple is harvesting credit card information from people who are not buying anything. That is illegal. Does not stop them doing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 11, @05:30PM (1 child)
I admin my dad's iMac and have no problem downloading apps without needing a CC#.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 11, @06:43PM
Every kid who passed thru the school district where I live has an apple ID they get to keep using after they leave school and none of the kids used a CC to sign up.
They had quite a scandal many years ago (maybe doxing myself) when the kids found out they cannot buy minecraft for their school ipads because the school account doesn't have a payment method but they sure can buy Apple gift cards, put a gift card on their school apple account, and buy minecraft (or whatever) with their gift card balance. I don't recall how that turned out although my son can play minecraft on his school issued ipad which is an answer I guess.
Apple's own help site claims a CC isn't required to create an account but it sure might be needed to buy stuff.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108647?device-type=iphone [apple.com]
Probably a part of the argument is debating what was required in the past. Back when the only way to get an i-device to run apps upon it, was to sign up for phone service for a then-new iphone, I find it totally likely that "Apple" required a CC as part of the phone service sign up.
My wife has extra cloud storage for her vast array of unviewed pictures that she can't delete and must hoard. I find it likely that if you have a reduced price subscription deal for icloud that Apple will require a CC when initially signing up. They also have a family sharing plan which my kids use under my wife's account, so possibly people are signing up "for icloud" without using a CC because they're actually using a family members plan.
Generally, I would not worry as much about Apples infosec policies quite as much as I'd worry about, say, the gas station around the corner or the local/regional grocery store. I went to both this morning. Apple is not a realistic threat vector compared to everything else being comparatively wide open and unsecured.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 11, @01:24AM
The company description triggers at least 3 scam alarms...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Wednesday February 11, @12:32AM (1 child)
Meanwhile 404 Media paid $2550 for an ad to run during the Superbowl.....
On one station in Ottumna, IA
(Score: 3, Touché) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 11, @01:21AM
You can also do things to get an additional discount [youtu.be].
(Score: 5, Touché) by ledow on Wednesday February 11, @08:13AM (1 child)
Guy who runs crypto.com, who bought ai.com for $70m just for the name, and posts on X...
Yeah, I'm done. There's no way I want anything to do with this guy.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 13, @08:02PM
AI.com seems to be for sale for $77,095.
The 'm' $70m -- does it mean thousand or million?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 11, @06:47PM
Isn't this supporting and feeding into the meme of "no such thing as bad PR" (public relations not pull request. In the post AI era most pull requests are bad LOL)
"Normies" are fine with the idea of paying for computers that don't work or that actively and intentionally by design work against them, so this outage report is just free advertising.
In other news I rebooted my laptop last night, can I get news coverage for that short term outage LOL?