Always Won Tech

The Day the Internet Faltered: Cloudflare’s Global Network Suffers Massive Outage, Taking Down Key Platforms Today, the digital world felt a seismic shudder. On Tuesday, November 18, 2025, a major outage at Cloudflare, one of the internet’s most critical infrastructure providers, cascaded across the globe, bringing down a significant portion of the web, including major platforms and even the services designed to track such downtime. The sheer scale of the disruption serves as a stark reminder of how fragile our interconnected digital ecosystem remains, despite continuous advancements in reliability. If your website, application, or favorite social media platform—like X (formerly Twitter)—suddenly displayed a cryptic “500 Internal Server Error” message this morning, you weren’t alone. You were witnessing the collateral damage of a fault in a single, powerful system: the Cloudflare Global Network. The Invisible Foundation Crumbles Cloudflare is not a website you typically visit, but it i...

  Android Vitals Will Track Wake Locks to Measure Battery Usage Battery drain remains one of the most frustrating issues for Android users, and Google is taking decisive action to address it. In a significant update to its Android Vitals platform, Google has introduced a new metric that tracks excessive partial wake lock usage, helping developers identify and eliminate apps that unnecessarily drain device batteries. What are Wake Locks? Wake locks are mechanisms that allow apps to keep a device's CPU running even when the screen is off. While this feature serves legitimate purposes such as playing music, tracking location during exercise, or downloading files improper implementation can cause significant battery drain. When apps hold wake locks longer than necessary, they prevent devices from entering low-power sleep states, resulting in rapid battery depletion. The New Metric in Action Google's refined excessive partial wake lock metric, developed in collaboration with Sa...

  The Password Paradox: Millions Still Use '123456'—Comparitech Reveals Our Greatest Flaw In an era of artificial intelligence, sophisticated zero-day exploits, and nation-state hacking, the most common threat to your digital life remains tragically simple: human laziness . ​Cybersecurity research firm Comparitech recently delivered a sobering verdict, analyzing over two billion real passwords leaked across dark web forums and data breach repositories. The findings confirm a disturbing pattern: despite years of public education and countless high-profile breaches, millions of accounts are still protected by credentials so weak, a basic automated script can crack them in less than a second. ​The analysis is not just a list of the internet’s worst habits; it’s a critical indicator of our collective vulnerability. For the alwayswon.com reader, this report is a wake-up call, demonstrating precisely why robust password hygiene remains the foundation of digital success. ​The Reig...

Don't Let a Glitch Steal Your Victory: The Task Manager Duplication Crisis 💻 In the quest for peak PC performance—the constant drive for faster load times, smoother gameplay, and ultimate system efficiency—we rely on one tool above all others: the Task Manager. It's our diagnostic shield, our performance scoreboard, and the ultimate arbiter of which processes live and which are terminated. But what happens when the very tool you trust to keep your system clean becomes the single biggest drain on your resources? A bizarre, resource-hogging bug confirmed by Microsoft is currently affecting some users running the latest Windows 11 optional preview update (KB5067036). This isn't just a minor visual glitch; it's a silent saboteur that allows the Task Manager to duplicate its process indefinitely, creating a runaway train of memory and CPU consumption. If you believe your system is running slower than it should, you need to read this guide and ensure you reclaim your perform...