Christ Church Huntingdon Blog

  Just over two weeks ago, the social media giant Facebook suffered a connection problem and for six hours the world went without WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook [1] . It was a major problem, not least because according to some reports the software glitch also affected the security in Facebook’s head office in California, meaning that employees couldn’t get into the building to rectify the situation. I found it quite amusing to read posts on the internet saying, things like “How I can’t live without my beloved Facebook” and “This is the only way I can talk to my American Girlfriend”, with someone posting “Have you tried texting, emailing, or just (throwing it out there), a phone call?!!” A similar thing happened in June when a customer of one website company, Fastly, just did a simple change of their settings, causing 85% of the websites they host to go down [2] . Well billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg soon apologised, and life returned to normal. I...

Earlier this week, on Monday night, facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp all suffered a 6 hour outage. If you logged on to any of these platforms, which are all run by the same company, you couldn’t load anything. The servers were down, and you couldn’t get a decent connection.  Eventually the servers did come back, and Facebook issued an official apology saying, “People and businesses around the world rely on us everyday to stay connected. We apologize to all those affected, and we’re working to understand more about what happened today so we can continue to make our infrastructure more resilient.”  I personally find these public apologies really interesting, because in our culture, it looks weak to say sorry. And actually, Facebook have done it in some very flowery language, but basically what they’re saying is “We messed up, we don’t know what happened, we’re sorry”.   My favourite example of this is Nick Clegg’s apology in 2012 after promisi...

In just under a month’s time, leaders from all over the world will be gathering in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit.  It’s been described by its president the Rt Hon Alok Sharma as “our last best hope for the world to come together and tackle climate change”. He says “the eyes of the world will be on Glasgow when global leaders arrive in November”  I wonder whether you take any notice of talk of global warming, or whether you get on with life. Some say that climate change is overstated, or just that there is enough much closer to home to worry about. But many today, including plenty of young people, are so concerned about what we are doing to the planet that they are willing to disrupt everyday life by climbing on train roofs or gluing themselves to the M25 to say protest.  Christians have lots to say about climate change. In fact at our church, Christ Church Huntingdon, we have been seeing in Genesis 1 on Sundays lately that this world is creat...