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 This week's best Apple deals include big discounts on AirTag, AirPods Max, and Mac mini. We're also tracking great sitewide sales at Satechi, Samsung, and Best Buy, with discounts on everything from Mac-compatible monitors to TVs, headphones, and more.
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 X seems to be working again after struggling with an outage that took the service offline and made it slow to load for much of the morning. According to X's developer platform page, there is an ongoing incident related to streaming endpoints that's caused increased errors. The incident started at 7:39AM PT, according to the page.
That roughly coincides with a spike in reports at Down Detector. The issues seemed to be somewhat intermittent. At some points, X's website loaded partially and only showed older posts. At other times, the app and website failed to load at all.
As of 9:30AM PT, X's Explore and trending pages were loading, but the "following" tab wasn't showing posts and instead suggested users "find some people and topic to follow" (as shown in the screenshot below).
Posts aren't loading.XAs of 11:15AM PT, X's developer site was still indicating ongoing issues, so there may still be some lingering problems even though the website seems to be functioning normally again. Reports on Down Detector have also dropped off considerably.
X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the outage. As TechCrunch
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You know things are messed up when a Big Tech company fights accusations of union-busting by insisting it was only AI layoffs. That's where things stand after a group of fired TikTok moderators in the UK filed a legal claim with an employment tribunal. The Guardian reported on Friday that around 400 TikTok content moderators who were unionizing were laid off before Christmas.
The workers were sacked a week before a vote was scheduled to establish a collective bargaining unit. The moderators said they wanted better protection against the personal toll of processing traumatic content at a high speed. They accused TikTok of unfair dismissal and violating UK trade union laws.
"Content moderators have the most dangerous job on the internet," John Chadfield, the national officer for tech workers at the Communication Workers Union (CWU), said in a statement to The Guardian. "They are exposed to the child sex abuse material, executions, war and drug use. Their job is to make sure this content doesn't reach TikTok's 30 million monthly users. It is high pressure and low paid. They wanted input into their workflows and more say over how they kept the platform safe. They said they were being asked to do too much with too few resources."
TikTok denied that the firings were union-busting, calling the accusations "baseless." Instead, the company claimed the layoffs were part of a restructuring plan amid its adoption of AI for content moderation. The company said 91 percent of transgressive content is now removed automatically.
The company first announced a restructuring exercise in August, just as hundre
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 Last year, the Unicode Consortium previewed some of the new emoji that are expected to be added to the iPhone with iOS 26.4 in March or April.
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Meta is killing the standalone Workrooms app on February 16, 2026. The company presented Workrooms as a virtual reality space where teams can meet and collaborate in an immersive environment when it launched the product. Now Meta says its Horizon platform has evolved enough to support "a wide range of productivity apps and tools," so it "made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app."
The company recently slashed its spending on the metaverse and started the process to lay off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division. Due to those layoffs and organizational changes, it
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Here are the settings to change to make sure you have the best picture possible from your TCL TV.
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Gone are the days in which you needed to spend a fortune to get a good smartphone. In 2026, features once exclusive to high-end smartphones - big batteries, multi-camera arrays, high refresh rate OLED displays and more - have made their way down to more affordable models. Yes, you'll still need to buy a flagship smartphone to get the best camera or fastest processor, but you don't have to make nearly as many compromises as you once did if you have a strict budget to adhere to when you go shopping for your next smartphone. If you have less than $600 to spend, let us help you figure out what features to prioritize when trying to find the best midrange smartphone.
Table of contents
Best midrange phones in 2026
What is a midrange phone?
What to consider before buying a midrange smartphone
What won't you get from a midrange phone
Best midrange phones for 2026
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 While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another eight months, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
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 An unreleased Apple display with the model number A3350 surfaced in a Chinese regulatory database today, according to a filing viewed by MacRumors.
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Hansi Flick's men take on the Segunda División leaders for a place in the quarterfinals.
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Even when you're in an area with good cellular coverage, your iPhone status might read SOS. Here's what to know.
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Bowing to pressure, the company said it would restrict X users from generating explicit images of real people in jurisdictions where such content is illegal.
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Cowork is a user-friendly version of Anthropic's Claude Code AI-powered tool that's built for file management and basic computing tasks. Here's what it's like to use it.
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What's not a given is paying full retail price. Yep, you can snag discounts on Windows 11. How much you'll save depends on your circumstances (and your stomach for hassle), but if you're lucky, you could technically get it for free. Legitimately for free, since installing Windows without ever activating it doesn't count as a full, sanctioned copy of the software. (Ahem.)
Here's how, in several different ways. These strategies often apply for Windows 10 licenses too, but that operating system got the axe on October 14. Your better bet will be Windows 11, as it'll get feature updates.
Simple upgrade: Trade up from Windows 10 to Windows 11
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Photo Credit: Fabrice Coffrini | Reuters
At present, there is no evidence that healthy children and adolescents need booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, World Health Organization chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a news briefing, she said that while there seems to be some waning of vaccine immunity over time against the fast-spreading Omicron variant of the coronavirus, more research is needed to determine who needs a booster shot.
"There is currently no evidence that healthy children or heavy adolescents need boosters. No evidence at all," he said.
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