Recode Daily: Behind the scenes at Amazon’s Prime Day disaster

Here’s what went on behind the scenes as Amazon engineers scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches that disrupted the e-commerce behemoth’s biggest sale day of the year. The company failed to secure enough servers to handle the traffic surge on Prime Day, causing a cascading series of failures during the first 15 minutes of the global “shopping holiday.” Amazon immediately launched a scaled-down “fallback” front page to reduce workload and temporarily killed all international traffic too. Amazon said it was still the “biggest shopping event” in its history, selling more than 100 million products to Prime members during the 36-hour event. [Eugene Kim / CNBC]

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Rupert Murdoch is winning the media megamerger game: The Federal Communications Commission unanimously voted to send the proposed merger between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media before an administrative law judge, which could delay and potentially sink the deal. Meanwhile, the Justice Department wants to speed up the timeline for its appeal of a court decision allowing AT&T Inc. to purchase Time Warner. And Comcast dropped its gambit to buy most of 21st Century Fox, ending a bidding war with Walt Disney, but said it would continue its pursuit of European pay TV giant Sky. A common thread for all three deals: They are breaking the way Rupert Murdoch, who has a very close relationship with Donald Trump, would like.

Hey Siri — where to next? The last of Siri’s three co-founders is leaving Apple. Tom Gruber, who was head of Siri’s Advanced Development group, is retiring; his departure comes as the Siri group is undergoing a major leadership change, as John Giannandrea, formerly Google’s artificial intelligence research and search chief, is taking over the unit. Apple’s head of search, Vipul Ved Prakash, has also left the company. [Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin / The Information]

Chance the … Publisher: The rapper, actor and philanthropist, a Chicago native, has purchased the defunct hyperlocal news website Chicagoist, announcing the deal in a new song. Chicagoist has been dormant since November, when owner Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade and patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs, shut down the site along with Gothamist, DNAinfo and others after the sites’ staffers voted to unionize under the Writers Guild of America East. Sample lyric: “I got a hit-list so long I don’t know how to finish/I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist bitches out of business.” [Robert Channick / Chicago Tribune]

Pretty much everyone expected Best Buy to die because of competition from Amazon, but the last national electronics chain is instead thriving because of hundreds of in-home tech consultants it calls “personal chief technology officers.” Best Buy has about 125,000 employees at about 1,000 big-box stores in North America. The company’s better-known Geek Squad deploys agents to help customers with repairs and installations; the advisers are focused on helping people make their homes smart and connected or merely more functional. Their house calls are free and not focused on sales, and can last as long as 90 minutes. [Susan Berfield and Matthew Boyle / Bloomberg Businessweek]

Top stories from Recode

WhatsApp will drastically limit forwarding across the globe to stop the spread of fake news, following violence in India and Myanmar.

The social messaging service has been blamed for its role in spreading dangerous and inaccurate information.

Your phone is not secretly spying on your conversations. It doesn’t need to.

Northeastern University researchers Dave Choffnes and Christo Wilson (mostly) debunk the internet’s favorite conspiracy theory on the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask.

This is cool

I turned on all the parental controls on my phone — and found bliss.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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