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TL;DR: AdGuard’s Family Plan gives you lifetime, device-wide protection from ads, trackers, and malicious sites for just $18.97 (reg. $169.99) with code FAMPLAN.

Opens in a new window Credit: AdGuard AdGuard Family Plan: Lifetime Subscription $18.97
$169.99 Save $151.02   Get Deal

If you’ve ever tried to troubleshoot constant pop-ups, frozen web pages, or those suspicious “Download Now” boxes that definitely shouldn’t be clicked, you already know how messy the internet can get.

AdGuard’s Family Plan is one of the easiest ways to clean all of that up — quietly, consistently, and without forcing everyone in the house to become a cybersecurity expert.

SEE ALSO: Should you pay for a VPN?

For a limited time, you can grab lifetime access to the AdGuard Family Plan for just $18.97 (reg. $169.99) with code FAMPLAN through Nov. 20 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Once you activate it, your protection never expires. That alone puts it miles ahead of the usual annual subscription shuffle.

AdGuard works on browsers, smartphones, laptops, tablets — pretty much anything your household uses. And this subscription covers nine devices. It blocks intrusive ads before they even load, cuts off third-party trackers, keeps sketchy phishing attempts out of your family’s path, and generally makes the web run faster and cleaner.

Gamers benefit from fewer laggy ad scripts; kids get a safer browsing experience with parental controls; and adults get fewer annoyances across the sites they use every day. What people appreciate most is that it runs quietly in the background. There’s no pop-up nagging, no complicated security dashboard that needs constant tuning, and no learning curve.

If you’re looking for a simple, affordable way to protect everyone’s devices while making the internet feel faster and less chaotic, this deal is one of the easiest wins of the season. Don’t miss grabbing lifetime access to AdGuard’s Family Plan while it’s just $18.97 (reg. $169.99) through Nov. 20 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

TL;DR: If you’re tired of switching between different AI apps, the 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan gives you a single lifetime workspace powered by all the industry-leading models for just $74.97 (reg. $540).

Opens in a new window Credit: 1minAI 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan Lifetime Subscription $74.97
$540 Save $465.03   Get Deal

If you’ve ever tried to keep up with all the different AI platforms, you know how messy it can get. One app handles writing. Another can edit images. A different one processes audio. And don’t forget the video editor. Plus the PDF tool. Plus, the model that does translations. And on and on.

1min.AI’s Advanced Business Plan basically puts an end to that AI chaos.

SEE ALSO: A new AI platform is giving lifetime access to ChatGPT, Gemini, and more

For a one-time payment of $74.97 (reg. $540), you get lifetime access to a single platform that brings together the top AI models — OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3 family, Google Gemini, Meta’s Llama 3, Mistral, Cohere, and more — inside one interface that’s designed to actually streamline your work instead of giving you 12 more logins.

What makes it especially useful is that the platform doesn’t just offer chat. It offers tools — real tools — for the work people actually do every day.

You can generate blog posts, rewrite content, create brand-consistent social captions, run keyword research, summarize long PDFs, extract info from documents, make images, edit photos, clean up audio, and even work with video.

The best part? Because all these features are powered by multiple models, you can pick whichever one fits your task. Need factual precision? Try Claude Opus. Want a creative brainstorm? Use GPT-4o. Need speed? Haiku or Gemini Pro are good options.

And since the subscription is lifetime, you’re not crossing your fingers waiting for a renewal discount next year.

Pick up lifetime access to the 1min.AI Advanced Business Plan while it’s just $74.97 (reg. $540).

StackSocial prices subject to change.

To avoid regulatory scrutiny, big tech companies had steered clear of buying start-ups outright. Meta’s antitrust win may change that thinking.

Cloudflare suffered a major outage on Nov. 18, and it took many major platforms down with it. OpenAI, Spotify, X, and Canva were among just some of the websites and services that went down Tuesday morning.

Feel like you're experiencing deja vu? Well, you're not. 

The recent Cloudflare outage is not to be confused with the recent Microsoft Azure outage, which resulted in Xbox, Minecraft, and other platforms going down. And don't forget the other major incident that occurred in October, when issues at Amazon Web Services (AWS) led to Amazon, Reddit, Snapchat, and other big platforms going offline. It's also completely separate from the June outage, when Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Cloudflare took down swaths of the internet

OK, so the internet's biggest websites and platforms have been going down a lot lately. What's going on here? 

Why do so many websites go down at the same time?

Those big social media platforms, e-commerce websites, and gaming networks are all using the same few major service providers to host and deliver their content, with Cloudflare being one of them.

Cloudflare is one of the largest Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which is a system that manages web traffic. When Cloudflare functions normally, it manages web traffic and protects platforms from attacks.

"CDNs are distributed infrastructures that accelerate content delivery and enhance user experience by caching and serving web content closer to users," explained Angelique Medina, Head of Internet Intelligence at the network intelligence company Cisco ThousandEyes, to Mashable. "They essentially serve as the 'front door' to websites and applications, with users connecting to Cloudflare’s servers instead of those of its customers."

"When this 'front door' becomes unavailable, users lose the entry point to many sites and applications," Medina said. "Given the large number of customers and sites that they service, any meaningful disruption in their ability to deliver content could effectively render large parts of the internet unreachable to users."

Basically, the internet has consolidated, and we're all reaping the rewards of that consolidation.

“This isn’t just another technical setback," said Ramutė Varnelytė, CEO of IPXO, a leading IP resource management platform in Europe, in a statement provided to Mashable. "It’s further proof of how exposed [the] digital economy is to various malfunctions in just a few of the digital infrastructure service providers."

Are internet outages occurring more frequently?

Back in the earlier days of the internet, there were countless web hosting providers, and many companies even ran their own dedicated servers. Now, companies big and small are all utilizing the same few cloud service providers, whether it be AWS, GCP, or Azure. Cloudflare makes the internet even more vulnerable to disruption, as the company has no one-to-one direct competitor.

"The incident further emphasizes the inherent danger of the entire internet infrastructure relying on a few service providers," Varnelytė said.

But, is that it? And are these services really going down more than usual? According to Cisco ThousandEyes, which tracks outages and maps them, that's correct. Web downtime is actually not happening more than usual, even if it seems that way.

"Cisco ThousandEyes has not seen an increase in the frequency of service outages in cloud and other Internet infrastructure providers; however, the number of sites and applications dependent on these services has increased," Medina shared. "Because these services are increasingly a point of centralization — with a small number of companies handling large swaths of the Internet — if something goes wrong, it can lead to the disruption of many sites and applications around the globe."

In short, the number of disruptions isn't increasing. Rather, the shockwaves of individual incidents are getting bigger.