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 Apple has set a new deadline of November 1, 2026 for all Patreon creators to switch from Patreon's legacy billing system to the App Store's in-app purchase system in the Patreon app on the iPhone and iPad, as reported by TechCrunch.
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Amazon has confirmed that it's letting go of 16,000 workers and employees across its organization. In an announcement by company SVP Beth Galetti, she explained that Amazon was going through organizational changes to reduce layers and remove bureaucracy. Affected employees in the US will be given 90 days to look for another internal role and will receive severance pay if they do not find any. Galetti also said that Amazon doesn't have plans to announce "broad reductions every few months" but admitted that the company could "make adjustments as appropriate."
News about the layoffs was leaked in an email mistakenly sent out early to workers, along with a calendar invitation for a meeting dubbed internally as "Project Dawn." In the email seen by Bloomberg and the BBC, Amazon Web Services Senior Vice President Colleen Aubrey told workers that their "impacted colleagues" from the US, Canada and Costa Rica had already been notified. "Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success," Aubrey reportedly wrote in the email.
Amazon eliminated 14,000 roles back in October 2025 across its games, logistics, payment and cloud computing divisions, with the availability of AI technologies being one of the main reasons for the layoffs. "Thi
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Music hardware and software manufacturer Native Instruments has entered into preliminary insolvency proceedings, according to a report by Create Digital Music. This is the company behind iconic software like Massive, Traktor and Kontakt and hardware like Maschine . Native Instruments also owns the brands iZotope, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance.
We don't have many specifics as to what this entails and what the future of the company will look like. We do know that an administrator has been appointed to handle restructuring and, potentially, to sell off existing assets. Native Instruments employs hundreds of people and their fates also remain uncertain.
A private equity firm called Francisco Partners owns a majority stake in the company. It also owns majority stakes in entities like GoodRX and Verifone, among others. This isn't the first time Native Instruments has been forced into major restructuring. The company experienced plenty of layoffs and uncertainty between 2019 and 2020 before being purchased by private equity.
Again, we have no idea how this will shake out. It's possible that new investors will jump on board and it goes back to business as usual. It's also possible everything will be scrapped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.
— cdmblogs (@cdmblogs)
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Wes Ott covers today's biggest tech stories, including a Gemini-backed Siri version of Siri appearing as early as next month. Plus, Amazon shuts down its supermarkets, and Meta experiments with paid tiers on its apps like Instagram and Facebook.
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Owen Poole covers today's top tech stories, including how TikTok's new American owners will impact your feed. Plus, Apple announced an updated AirTag that promises to track things even more easily. The European Commission starts investigating Elon Musk's Grok for generating explicit images, following its bans in various countries.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that his office is investigating whether TikTok is truly censoring content critical of Trump, days after ByteDance finalized a deal to spin off its business in the US. Newsom made the announcement in response to a post on X, claiming that you can no longer send messages in the app with the word "Epstein" in it. Newsom's office, in a separate post, said it was able to independently confirm instances wherein TikTok suppressed content critical of President Donald Trump.
The governor's office told Politico that it tried to send a direct message with the word "Epstein" in it and got a warning that it could not be sent because it may violate TikTok's community guidelines. Newsom's team is now "launching a review of this conduct and is calling on the California Department of Justice to determine whether it violates California law."
If you'll recall, ByteDance finalized a deal for a new US entity just as TikTok was about to be banned in the US. ByteDance only owns 19.9 percent of the new entity called the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, while the new investors own 80 percent. Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati fund MGX have a 15 percent stake each. The US business will now retrain TikTok's algorithm on US data and will also be in charge of content moderation.
After the US entity's announcement, users started
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TikTok has reached a settlement in a closely-watched lawsuit over social media addiction, narrowly avoiding a trial that's scheduled to begin jury selection Tuesday. Terms of the deal, which was reported by The New York Times, weren't disclosed.
TikTok's settlement comes about one week after Snap reached a settlement in the same case. The trial is expected to move forward in Los Angeles with Meta and YouTube as the only defendants. Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the plaintiff, said in a statement to NYT that they were "pleased" with the settlement and that it was "a good resolution." TikTok didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
The trial stems from a 2023 lawsuit brought by a California woman known in court documents as "K.G.M." She sued Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube and alleged that their platforms were addictive and had harmed her as a child. The judge in the case previously ordered the companies' executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, to testify. YouTube's top exec, Neal Mohan, is also likely to testify, according to The New York Times.
The lawsuit is the first among several high-profile cases against social media companies to go to trial this year. Meta is expected to head to court in New Mexico in early February in a case brought by the state's attorney general, who
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 TikTok last week finalized a deal to hand over its U.S. operations to a majority American-owned venture, and things aren't exactly running smoothly for the new U.S. company so far.
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"i've been reading about brain chips that they can implant in your head and they can achieve super cool things. can u explain?"
The post Ask Trish: Neurotechnology appeared first on ConnectSafely.
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US companies announced 82,307 job cuts in January — more than double the number in December — and layoffs are expanding beyond tech companies and media. About half the companies that have announced layoffs in the first two months of 2024 are in finance and other industries.
Some of the companies cutting jobs this year include Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Cisco, Citigroup, Citrix, DocuSign, eBay, Estée Lauder, Grammarly, Instacart, iRobot, Levi Strauss, Macy's, Mattel, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Pixar, NASA, Nike, Okta, Paramount Global, PayPal, REI, Rivian, Salesforce, Snapchat, Toast, Twitch, UPS, Unity Software, Wayfair, and Zoom. (In addition to Computerworld's layoff tracker, you can get details about recent cuts from TechCrunch and Layoffs.fyi.)
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