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Thursday, August 27, 2026

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With mass layoffs plannned, Meta reassigns thousands of employees to AI initiatives.

The New York Times and Reuters report that a memo was sent to Meta employees on Monday reassigning 7,000 of them, and said that “As org leaders worked on the changes, many of them incorporated AI native design principles ⁠into their new org structures.” The memo told employees to work remotely on Wednesday, when it will lay off about 10 percent of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, with emails sent at 4AM local time. [Link: Meta lays out details of May 20 restructuring in internal document | https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-lays-out-plans-may-20-layoffs-restructuring-internal-document-says-2026-05-18/ | Reuters]

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GitHub just had a major outage.

GitHub uses a queue for developers when lots of people are working on a single project. It’s designed to avoid changes clashing and developers breaking things, but yesterday it failed in a catastrophic way thanks to a bug that randomly reverted previously merged commits (code snapshots). GitHub also had other outages yesterday, on the same day I reported on employee concerns about GitHub reliability and leadership. [Link: Inside Microsoft’s wave of executive departures | https://www.theverge.com/tech/917361/microsoft-executive-departures-notepad | The Verge]

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down after nearly 30 years at the company. He’ll be replaced by John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.

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Meta removes ads from lawyers seeking plaintiffs for social media addiction cases.

Now that a jury has ruled against Meta and YouTube in a landmark trial, the sharks are circling, and what better place to find potential clients than on those social media platforms? The only problem is that Axios reports Meta pulled “more than a dozen” such ads from firms like Morgan & Morgan and Sokolove Law on Thursday. [Link: Social media on trial: tech giants face lawsuits over addiction, safety, and mental health | https://www.theverge.com/policy/880850/social-media-lawsuits-meta-facebook-instagram-tiktok | The Verge]

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Whoop gives a whoop about what now?

After scoring $575 million in funding earlier this week, Whoop is suing Bevel — a startup that has marketed itself as “Whoop, but for the Apple Watch.” The complaint centers on whether Bevel copied Whoop’s app, a claim the former denies. Can’t lie… I feel like I’ve seen 10,000 versions of this app design over the last decade. [Media: https://twitter.com/greyngyen/status/2040100105336799659?s=20]

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Amazon is making an Alexa phone

Amazon is reportedly developing a new smartphone centered around its Alexa AI and drawing inspiration from the $700 minimalist Light Phone.

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Facebook was reportedly having some issues earlier.

At around 5:30PM ET, Downdetector showed a recent peak of more than 11,000 user reports of problems, but reports of issues have fallen dramatically. At 5:48PM ET, NetBlocks said the platform was experiencing “international outages.” A Meta status page was showing “high disruptions” for Facebook Ads Manager, including ads creation and delivery, but that has been “resolved.”