You’re tellin’ me that it’s already time for basketball season? Where has the time flown?

As I write this, I am re-watching Game 7 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers — this time at home. On June 22, my family and I, along with about 20 other Oklahomans were stuck in New York City due to travel complications after a lengthy European tour with the Oklahoma Ambassadors of Music.

My wife and stepdaughter saw a Broadway show in Manhattan.

I headed to Yard House near Times Square, looking for a cold beer and a TV. Not a chance I was going to miss Game 7, especially after missing most of the NBA Finals because we were in Europe.

The place was packed, and no seats were available. The bartender noticed me rooting, and he hooked me up with a chair and a cold Yuengling.

I feel like I’ve told this story already 1,000 times, but you can’t convince me that New Yorkers aren’t every bit as friendly as us Okies.

The Broadway show ended, and we took the subway and a taxi back to our hotel in East Rutherford, New Jersey, where we watched the last quarter and a half together in our room.

Tonight at 6p, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen (and Jaylin!) Williams, Chet, Lu, Alex and many more will get their championship rings.

And this time, I can assure you I will be at home to watch. Thunder up!

You can message me anytime at [email protected].

***

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Perfect.

🌡️ Tuesday's high in OKC 74°
🌡️ Tuesday’s high in Tulsa 73°

By Hannah France, KGOU
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OKLAHOMA CITY — More than 1,000 people joined a No Kings protest Saturday outside City Hall in Oklahoma City, donning ponchos and inflatable costumes in the rain to rally against President Donald Trump. 

The No Kings protests, which took place in hundreds of cities across all 50 states and in the nation’s capital, are intended to denounce the Trump administration and rally against “chaos, corruption, and cruelty.” 

Many protest signs and speakers focused on anger with Trump’s deportation campaign using Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Congress’ failure to release the Epstein files and the conflict in Gaza. 

Rosa Valdez said she’s never been involved in politics, but that seeing immigrants removed from their homes without due process brought her to the protest.

“There’s a lot of people that have been around me in my lifetime that have fallen victim to what is going on right now and have, unfortunately, been deported,” she said. “And just the way that everything has gone down, I know that they didn’t get any court (date) or anything like that.”

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By Ryan Welton
Oklahoma Memo

The big story on Monday might have been the inability to even file stories — or make sales, do work, or surf social media. An issue with Amazon Web Services in the wee hours of the morning wreaked havoc globally all day long.

One report I read suggested billions of dollars lost because the outage. The good news is that as of 6p Monday, everything is reportedly back to normal.

According to that report from CNBC, “The outage was first reported at 3:11 a.m. ET in AWS’ main US-East-1 region hosted in northern Virginia. A notice on AWS’ status page said it was experiencing DNS problems with DynamoDB, its database service that underpins many other AWS applications.”

So what happened?

This article from Mashable offered the clearest explanation I could find: “The exact reason AWS initially went down remains unknown, but we have an idea. Services using AWS were unable to access DynamoDB, an Amazon-run database, because the Domain Name System (DNS) had a problem. The DNS effectively translates website names into IP addresses. So when Amazon wrote on its Health Dashboard that the DNS issue had been "fully mitigated," it's saying the real problem was fixed.”

Was it a cyberattack? Experts do not believe it was.

A professor of security engineering told The Guardian that the outage was likely not malicious.

“The incident appears to have been caused by some accident within AWS, rather than being the result of any malicious intent,” said Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London.

However, the sentiment by many other experts was that regardless of why Monday’s outage happened, the global business world is far too dependent on far too few vendors for mission-critical services.

This is Risk Management 101, folks, and it’s why you’ve heard more voices in the tech world angling for the biggest players to be broken up (a la Southwestern Bell) into smaller companies — to create competition, sure, but in this case, to diversify the infrastructure so that there isn’t what IT folks would call a “single point of failure.”

Editor’s note: Links requiring subscriptions have an *.

A hand-curated list of the best journalism from across the state:

• City to pay $15 million to two men wrongly incarcerated for murder (Tulsa World)*

• Oklahoma State students still in shock as search for shooting suspect continues (KOCO)

• Listen Frontier: Are Oklahoma classrooms too wired for learning? (The Frontier)

• Tulsa to purchase, convert former juvenile detention center into homeless shelter (The Oklahoma Eagle)

• Oklahoma predator hunters face felony charges (Oklahoma Watch)

• Osage Nation Congress moves toward possible removal of AG Clint Patterson (Osage News)

• Inconsistencies between state, federal agencies surrounding immigrant arrested in Oklahoma (News On 6)

• Critics say CompSource plan will hurt policyholders (Oklahoma Watch)

• Oklahoma lawmakers to study data center growth impact (KSWO)

• Interim study focuses on license plate readers, privacy concerns (KGOU)

• She wanted to slow down traffic in her Tulsa neighborhood. Language became a speed bump (Tulsa Flyer & La Semana)

• Teen lucky to be alive after speeding car slams through fence, into Tecumseh home (KOCO)

• Queens Village Tulsa: “Rooted in sisterhood, rising in power” uplifts Black mothers (The Black Wall Street Times)

• Oklahoma transmission lines to be upgraded through Energy Department loan guarantee (KOSU)

• Google donates money for energy efficiency, tech upgrades in Stillwater Public Schools (KOSU)

• Oklahoma teen driver safety course to include impacts of impaired driving (Oklahoma Voice)

• Ardmore addresses downtown flooding concerns (KTEN)

• Caddo youth keep traditions alive with Gardening Day, end-of-summer harvest (KOSU)

• Tulsa Botanic Garden unveils gift from Mexican sister city (Public Radio Tulsa)

• State hosts food truck inspections for owners in one spot (KFOR)

The ‘Oklahoma Memo’ mission is simple: Reignite the daily local news habit by connecting Oklahomans and those who love Oklahoma to quality sources of news and vetted information.

✅ Save you time.
✅ Make you smarter.
✅ Protect Democracy.