Google AI now plans your trips for you

Presented by

☕ Good morning,

Cloudflare decided to trip over its own cables yesterday, and half the internet face-planted with it. Because of that, our Tech Barista section got clipped shorter than usual. Not ideal, but when the backbone of the web sneezes, everyone else catches it.

Everything’s back on track now, so your full pour of tech updates will resume tomorrow as normal. Thanks for riding out the glitch with us.

_{—Here’s to the first sip.}

TODAY IN AI
Google adds new AI tools to plan and book travel

Google is loading up Search and AI Mode with new travel tools, and the whole idea is to let AI handle the boring parts of planning a trip so you can just focus on where you want to go.

The biggest upgrade is Canvas in AI Mode. You tell it what kind of trip you’re planning, hit “Create Canvas,” and it instantly builds a travel plan on the side panel. It pulls in live flight and hotel data, Maps reviews, photos, restaurant ideas, and activity suggestions. You can tweak everything with follow-up questions, like choosing between cheaper hotels or ones closer to the places you want to visit.

Google is also taking its Flight Deals tool global. Instead of manually hunting for bargains, you just describe your travel preferences and it shows the best cheap options. It now works in more than 200 countries and supports 60+ languages.

And then there’s agentic booking, which is basically AI Mode doing the booking legwork for you. You describe your dinner plans or event needs, and it checks platforms like OpenTable, Resy, Ticketmaster, and others to find real openings. It hands you a clean list with direct links to finish the booking. This now works for all US users.

Google says flights and hotel booking inside AI Mode is coming next, and they’re already working with major partners like Booking.com, Marriott, Expedia, and more to make that possible.

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TECH BARISTA
Cloudflare outage knocks major sites offline worldwide

Cloudflare had a rough morning, and it took a big chunk of the internet down with it. A sudden spike in strange traffic hit one of its services around 6:20 a.m. ET, and that was enough to break sites across the web. People saw errors on X, ChatGPT, DownDetector, Spotify, Uber, Canva, major news outlets like Gizmodo, The Hacker News etc, and even the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Basically, if a site relied on Cloudflare’s network, there was a good chance it either wouldn’t load or felt half-broken.

Cloudflare says it still doesn’t know what caused the traffic spike, but the company went all-hands to get things moving again. By mid-morning, some platforms were recovering, and Cloudflare pushed a fix that restored its dashboard and started stabilizing traffic. Full recovery took longer, but most services eventually came back online.

This isn’t Cloudflare’s first big outage, and the pattern highlights a bigger problem. A huge portion of the internet relies on a few infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the hyperscalers behind them. When one of these players hiccups, everything from messaging apps to transportation networks to federal websites can blink offline. Signal’s president summed it up well: we’ve ended up with an internet where there aren’t many real alternatives.

It also arrives barely a month after AWS suffered a long outage that took down Fortnite, Alexa, and Snapchat, which only reinforces how fragile the whole ecosystem can be when so much depends on a few backbone providers.