# The Pulse: Firebase’s global outage & poor response

> Source: <https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-firebases-global-outage>
> Published: 2026-10-01 16:43:19+00:00

*The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups.*

Today, we cover:

1. **Firebase: global outage & poor handling by Google.** The Firebase iOS SDK crashed after a backend change, crashing all apps which used Firebase analytics for 2-6 hours. Google did not update the status page or offer any postmortem, which is a head-scratcher from a company known for standout incident management practices.
2. **OpenAI’s platform play from AWS playbook?** OpenAI is becoming a platform where it’s possible to allocate ChatGPT spend on open models and AI offerings from among 16 partners, not just OpenAI models. It’s fair to ask if Anthropic will consider a similar platform play.
3. **More data on companies moving to open models.** Vercel’s AI gateway shows 60% of model spend goes to open weight models, and OpenRouter also shows open models are being more used than closed ones.
4. **Why CTOs and VPEs are quitting en masse: another take.** What if it’s not “founder mode”, but about people who love building software, feeling like they can do it solo (or with a small team) with AI tools?