Author: TechBrunch

Google's next big hardware event is scheduled for August 13 at 10am PST, roughly two months earlier than its usual mid-fall Made By Google event, and it's notable that the company will unveil its latest flagship device, the Pixel 9, ahead of the iPhone 16. Apple's latest products are due to be unveiled in September. Google hasn't offered a justification for the change — perhaps things are too noisy now, less than a month before the strangest presidential election in modern U.S. history — but the company certainly has a lot to discuss with Gemini, too, and the new device…

WazirX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in India, has “temporarily” suspended all trading activity on its platform, days after a security breach caused it to lose roughly $230 million, nearly half of its reserves. The Mumbai-based exchange said in a tweet on Sunday evening that the cyberattack had significantly impaired its ability to maintain the crucial 1:1 collateral ratio with its assets, raising further concerns about the adequacy of WazirX's reserves and its ability to repay customers in full. WazirX suspended customer withdrawals earlier this week after an attacker gained access to one of the exchange's multi-signature wallets, which…

When is a startup not a startup? When it's a publicly traded company with 1,300 employees and $2.5 billion in capital. If that statement doesn't bring a smile to your face, it's because we're not kidding. It's the reality for Nebius, an emerging AI infrastructure company born from the ashes of Yandex, the multi-billion dollar behemoth that was once billed as “Russia's Google.” “We're starting a business, so it's like a startup, but it's unusually big,” Yandex co-founder and former CEO Arkady Volozh told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “But what we're trying to build is actually going to…

Google parent Alphabet is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wizz for $23 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, with TechCrunch sources saying they had heard the same story, adding that deal talks could continue into next week. If the deal goes through, it would be Alphabet's largest acquisition to date. It would also be a massive exit for the startup at a time when exits, especially M&A, haven't picked up as many had expected heading into 2024. If the deal goes through, it could impact venture firms and startups in a variety of ways, some more obvious,…

The recent CrowdStrike outage affected approximately 8.5 million devices – less than 1% of Windows machines worldwide – according to a blog post by David Weston, Microsoft's vice president of enterprise and operating system security. These are the first hard numbers released by Microsoft and CrowdStrike about the scale of yesterday's outage, which was caused by an update to CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software that crashed Windows machines (Mac and Linux devices were not affected). Although the number of affected devices was relatively small, the disruptions were widespread and global, affecting banks, retailers, brokerages, rail networks, and more. Airlines grounded flights worldwide.…

There comes a time in every startup’s life when the leaders and stakeholders have to seriously start thinking about the endgame: What to do when you’ve raised $150 million in VC cash over 15 years en route to building a 100 million-plus community? And how do you go about executing that next step to ensure that you not only survive, but also thrive? This is the predicament that Strava, the social fitness app and community, finds itself in. At a crossroads, of sorts, where it has reached meaningful scale driven by the grit typical of many founder-led businesses, but where…

It's been an eventful week for Silicon Valley heavyweights who have pledged their support for Donald Trump's reelection bid. Given where tech and Trump are headed, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I could buy her another ticket to the Republican National Convention, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, Silicon Valley’s presence was palpable everywhere. Jacob Helberg, husband of venture capitalist Keith Rabois and evangelist for former President Donald Trump, watched the Republican National Convention from a private box overlooking the floor, wearing a red yarmulke with “Trump” emblazoned on the…

The outages caused by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike have brought travel and business to a standstill around the world, but as much of the world slowly comes back online, malicious actors are also looking to exploit the situation for their own profit. The U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said in a statement on Friday that while the CrowdStrike outage was not linked to a cyberattack or malicious activity, “we have observed threat actors leveraging the incident for phishing and other malicious activity.” CISA warned people to “avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links” that could lead to email compromise or other…

Windows users around the world woke up to “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) on Friday morning due to a glitch in a CrowdStrike software update. The bug caused outages around the world, bringing airlines, ships, hospitals and banks to a halt. But some are seeing opportunity in the rubble. The global blackout is a perfect reminder of how dependent the world is on technological infrastructure. In the midst of the disaster, some venture capitalists are seeing an opportunity for new technologies to prevent something like this from ever happening again. In 2024, we probably won't be allowed to take down…

Twitch has reinstated former President Donald Trump's account ahead of the 2024 presidential election after “indefinitely” banning it in 2021. The Amazon-owned company told TechCrunch on Friday that it reinstated Trump's channel because it believes “there is value in hearing directly from presidential candidates when possible.” Prior to the ban, Trump's team had been using his channel to air parts of his election campaign, and now that the ban has been lifted, his channel can resume doing so. Twitch joined many other tech companies in banning President Trump's account following the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, including Twitter…