Nears a decade low: Builders began work on fewer offices, shopping centers and other commercial projects in January, such that construction spending declined near to a decade low. Builders trimmed their activity 0.7% in January, following a revised 1.6% decline in December, the Commerce Department reported today. The consecutive declines pushed total spending down to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $791.8 billion in January, close to the decade low of $791.5 billion hit in August. The current pace of construction activity is just about half of the $1.5 trillion level that economists believe would signal a healthy construction sector. They think it could be another four years before construction recovers to that level.
Messages weren’t lost: Google says an update to e-mail storage software led to an unexpected bug Sunday that left tens of thousands of Gmail users without access to their messages. Google said in a blog post late Monday night that e-mails were never actually lost, and it has restored access to many people who were affected. Google says about 0.02% of Gmail users encountered the problem, or two out of 10,000. Gmail has hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Google says it backs up users’ information on tape. Since tapes are offline, they are protected from such software bugs.
