Apple Investigating Reports Of ‘Serious Battery Failure’ On iPhone 8 Plus

Apple has admitted it’s looking into multiple reports of  swelling batteries in its new flagship iPhone 8 Plus smartphones.

Pictures on social media and growing reports from tech websites and mainstream news media have shown a number of the high end iPhone 8 Plus handsets that appeared to have split alongside the side, forcing the screen to come away from the main body of the phone.

The issue seems to appear during charging. The issue also appears to be global, with several similar faults being reported in Europe, Asia, and North America, suggesting that the fault may be more than just a single bad batch, although how many are original reports are authentic is still unknown.

An Apple spokesperson said the company was currently looking into the issue, but the company has not elaborated further at the time of writing. Several devices have however, allegedly been collected by Apple partners and returned for investigation by the tech giant.

Fire in the disco?
While reports of swelling batteries is a serious concern, there have been no reports of any of them catching fire. The chemical makeup of lithium-ion batteries and the energy they store can however make them a potential hazard with any kind of fault.

Didn’t this happen last year?
Yes. Except the fault last year was with the Samsung GaIaxy Note 7, which Samsung were forced to recall after several incidents of the battery catching fire while charging. There were only around 100 confirmed incidents of the Note 7 actually catching fire.

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Google Cloud acquires Bitium

Google Cloud announced today that it has acquired Bitium, a company that focused on offering enterprise-grade identity management and access tools, such as single-sign on, for cloud-based applications. This will basically help Google better manage enterprise cloud customer implementation across an organization, including doing things like setting security levels and access policies for applications working across their Cloud and G Suite offerings.

Bitium was founded in 2012, and targets both mid market and larger enterprise customers,. It’s been offering a single-stop solution for managing Google Apps, Office 365, social network, CRM, collaboration and marketing tools, while ensuring organizations remain compliant with security standards.

The goal of Bitium is to simplify the process of administrating and using popular cloud-based applications so that users aren’t tempted to enter the nefarious realm of “shadow IT,” where they fall back to their own personal accounts across these services because the enterprise alternative is sub-standard or difficult to access.

It sounds like Google wants to continue the work that Bitium was doing on its own, and extend it to additional application partners, while also keeping the platform open to other third-party identity management providers that integrate with enterprise customers on the one side, and Google Cloud and G Suite on the other.

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