I have been holding this post back because over the past two weeks there has been a lot in motion, and I was still training and getting used to my new position within Amazon.

If you don't regularly follow me on social media, this is likely going to be news to you. On April 20, 2026, I began my new role as a HazWaste Coordinator (L3) at my local Amazon Fulfillment Center. This change has been a long time in the making and something I have been working towards (at least in the respect of a tier 3 role) since just a few months after I joined Amazon.

I chose to accept the role as a HazWaste Coordinater at Amazon because I believe in what we do in Amazon, promoting not only good practice dealing with products being disposed of in a proper manner, but in the Safety team as a whole. I have always focused on my efforts to provide a safe workplace, no matter where I have worked.

With over 15 years of overall Safety training, and experience, I believe I can provide a value to the team that I am working for, and I am eternally greatful for the opportunity to be a part of a compassionate team of people who also believe in the same.

I will keep you all posted on my progress throughout my journey.

The Windows Insider program has always been a hodgepodge of different branches that were all collectively trying to complete the same task, but never really had a clear identity when it came to what branch was trying to accomplish what.

Simplifying the noise

According to a a blog post from the Windows Insider Team the company is working to streamline the amount of branches currently available in the program. Now the company has chosen to go with two testing branches Experimental and Beta.

The Experimental branch is going to merge the current Dev and Canary channels which largely focus on features that may or may not come to production versions of Windows.

As for the Beta branch it will focus on actual Windows releases and features that Microsoft actually plans on releasing to the general public.

Microsoft states that this rollout will be coming in the next few weeks and users will be able to change what channel they are in. Users who are in the Dev and Canary channel will be rolled into the Experimental channel and Beta will remain in the same Beta channel.

We launched the new CMS called Plasma at the beginning of March and have been working on and off on the development of the platform. We've made great progress on the frontend UI but are still working deeply on the backend integrations.

Focusing on stability

Effective April 11, 2026, we will be focusing our efforts on building the core of Plasma to be more stable and agile so that we can move the application in the event of a future failure. The events of the last outage has given us an opportunity to shift our focus and develop an overall better product.

Feature drops

We still plan on dropping new features as time progresses as they become available. Because this release is primarily focused on stability, we also want to ensure that any features that we scheduled to launch with the 18.0 release are also stable and ready for general use. This may delay the public release from it's originally scheduled timeframe to a more reasonable summer timeframe.

What about videos?

In a post that was publishjed before the server outage, we mentioned that we were working on a platform to host our own content. We are still working on the backend for that. As of right now, it is not yet available for use, we are working with our CDN, CacheFly to tie up some loose ends and hope to make an announcement soon regarding the public beta.

On March 30, 2026 we were performing regular server maintenance on the system that was hosting the website ran into a catastrophic hardware failure resulting in immediate data loss to the Operating System drive.

The Root Cause

After careful investigation, we determined that a misconfigured virtual machine was the result of a system-wide failure. We have since re-imaged the system and restored all core services to the network and deployed an additional server for hosting the website to prevent further action in the future from occuring.

"After careful evaluation of our core systems, we have implemented new mitigations to prevent future occurances of this issue. We have adjusted hardware and software configurations to prevent such actions in the future. This is a classic example of what not to do when deploying systems, and we deeply apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused." A spokseperson said from CORE Systems IO said.

Resolution

This issue has been fully addressed and you should be able to use the website normally, if any future issues occur, please feel free to reach out to our team.