Technology

Database admin pilot fish is on call and sleeping soundly when his beeper goes off at 1 a.m.

But it's not an alert from monitoring software or from the trouble center. The phone number on the pager is one fish doesn't recognize.

He calls the number. It's a user who tells him that a job on the server is stuck, and he's not getting new rows into a table.

Bleary-eyed fish logs on and checks. Sure enough, the job has a problem. A single mouse click restarts the job, and it's working again.

But fish also notices in the log that the job has been stuck since 10:30 a.m. -- two days before.

"Yeah, it's been annoying," user explains when fish asks about it. "The stuck job has been paging me to tell me there's a problem every 15 minutes."

Earlier today, General Motors& Cruise received a $2.25 billion investment from SoftBankVision Fund. Once that deal closes, GM will invest another $1.1 billion.

SoftBank landed on Cruise because itone of &a handful that in our view have a meaningful opportunity in front of them,& SoftBank Vision Fund Managing Partner Michael Ronen told TechCrunch. Cruiseintegrated play of hardware and software attracted SoftBank, Ronen said, as well as the fact that Cruisespirit, creativity and energy &has not been diminished at all.&

These investments are expected to enable Cruise to deploy commercially starting next year. But whatmost important about this investment to Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, he told TechCrunch, is the fact that Cruise — which sold to GM for more than $1 billion in 2016 —now has stock and equity in the company again.

Thatbecause &we&re in a war right now to attract the greatest minds in the world to work on this,& Vogt told me. And in order to keep those great minds on board and continue attracting new ones, Vogt said he wants to give them a chance to &participate in the value we create.&

&From my standpoint, itlike we&re a startup all over again,& he told me.

Based on Cruiserate of improvement in self-driving testing, the company is still on track to commercialization next year, GM President Dan Ammann told TechCrunch. Regarding what that commercialization looks like has yet to be determined.

While Cruiseservice will be a consumer-facing experience and network, &we remain open to other opportunities to partner with folks if and when that makes sense,& Ammann said. He added that partnering with SoftBank, which has invested in ride-hailing companies like Didi, Uber and Grab, brings an ecosystem and relationships along with it.

TOKYO, JAPAN & MAY 10: SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son speaks during a press conference on May 10, 2017 in Tokyo, Japan. SoftBank announced net profit for its fiscal year ending 31 March today reporting a record profit of 1.43 trillion yen ($12.5 billion). (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

But before Cruise gets to commercialization, the company needs to be confident in its safety abilities — especially in light of the fatal crash in March involving one of Uberself-driving cars.

&Our ultimate decision to go fully driverless will be gated by safety and whether we&re operating at a certain level of safety,& Ammann said.

Ammann declined to comment on the specifics of its safety metrics and assessments, but said Cruise is engaged with regulators to make those types of assessment.

&You should assume we have a very deep understanding of what that looks like and how we measure it, but we don&t want to share detail on that at this time,& Ammann said.

SoftBankRonen echoed GMAmmann comments about safety and commercial deployment, noting these are early days and itimportant to get the technology and safety right.

Cruise and GMfourth generation steering wheel-free car

&This is the first time we&ll all be putting our lives in the hands of robots, literally, daily and if the safety is not there, nothing is going to work, no matter what form you put it in on the road,& Ronen said.

Once Cruise gets to that point, the next step is to determine the best option for deployment. And, as Ronen pointed out, itnot like the U.S. will suddenly be filled with Cruiseautonomous cars in 2019. Instead, he said, &itgoing to be a gradual process.&

Earlier this year, Cruise CTO AG Gangadhar, formerly of Uber, left his role at the company. Vogt is currently operating as CEO and CTO of Cruise, and he told me he loves it.

&I&m really enjoying this,& Vogt said about being acting CTO. &So this is the way itgoing to be for the foreseeable future.&

Following what it calls a &cyber incident,& the event ticket distributor Ticketfly took its homepageoffline on Thursday morning. The company left this message on its website, which remains nonfunctional hours later:

Following a series of recent issues with Ticketfly properties, we&ve determined that Ticketfly has been the target of a cyber incident. Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken all Ticketfly systems temporarily offline as we continue to look into the issue. We are working to bring our systems back online as soon as possible. Please check back later.

For information on specific events please check the social media accounts of the presenting venues/promoters to learn more about availability/status of upcoming shows. In many cases, shows are still happening and tickets may be available at the door.

Before Ticketfly regained control of its site, a hacker calling themselves IsHaKdZ hijacked it to display apparent database files along with a Guy Fawkes mask and an email contact.

According to correspondence with Motherboard, the hacker apparently demanded a single bitcoin (worth $7,502, at the time of writing) to divulge the vulnerability that left Ticketfly open to attack. Motherboard reports that it was able to verify the validity of at least six sets of user data listed in the hacked files, which included names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of Ticketfly customers, as well as some employees. We&ll update this story as we learn more.

Update:Ticketfly has added an FAQ page on the incident. The company notes that the event &resulted in the compromise of some client and customer information& and is conducting an investigation as it works to get its site back online.