Author: TechBrunch

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…

The CrowdStrike outage, which occurred early on Friday morning, took down computers running Microsoft Windows and caused flight cancellations around the world. Major US airlines, including United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, have suspended operations around the world. Seven percent of United's flights, 8% of American Airlines' flights and 12% of Delta's flights have been cancelled, according to FlightAware, which tracks cancellations in real time. By comparison, each airline canceled 3%, 4% and 1% of its flights, respectively, on Thursday. As of 11 a.m. ET, nearly 3,000 flights had been canceled today, bringing the total number of delayed…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly roundup of must-see stories from the startup world. This week's most interesting startup stories Shortly after Google parent Alphabet reportedly abandoned plans to acquire online marketing software company HubSpot, the tech giant has decided to pursue another big acquisition. This time, Google is in talks to pay $23 billion for Wiz, a cloud security startup that's experiencing phenomenal growth. Just four years old, Wiz has already hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), TechCrunch learned exclusively this week. Google's offer exceeds Wiz's previous market cap of $12 billion, but would the giant agree…

The CrowdStrike disaster was a catastrophic one, as a bug in the company's Windows software rendered PCs unusable, disrupting flights, canceling elective medical procedures and leaving many office workers waiting in daze for hours. Not surprisingly, CrowdStrike's stock price plummeted, even as the company's CEO, George Kurtz, promised a fix and systems were slowly starting to come back online. Rivals stand to benefit. While it's hard to predict just how much of an impact this will have on businesses from what's being called the worst IT outage in history, investors seem to sense an opportunity: Shares of CrowdStrike competitors SentinelOne…

The CrowdStrike disaster was a catastrophic one, as a bug in the company's Windows software rendered PCs unusable, disrupting flights, canceling elective medical procedures and leaving many office workers waiting in daze for hours. Not surprisingly, CrowdStrike's stock price plummeted, even as the company's CEO, George Kurtz, promised a fix and systems were slowly starting to come back online. Rivals stand to benefit. While it's hard to predict just how much of an impact this will have on businesses from what's being called the worst IT outage in history, investors seem to sense an opportunity: Shares of CrowdStrike competitors SentinelOne…

There's a man in Florida who wants to propose to his girlfriend while they're on a beach vacation. He can't get the engagement ring before they fly in from New England, but that doesn't seem like a big deal: His girlfriend's daughter, Nicole, is coming to Florida to celebrate her mother's birthday, so he asked her to get the ring before the flight. In an ideal world, Nicole — who didn't want to reveal her last name lest her mother find out about the surprise proposal — would fly to Florida on Friday to deliver the ring, and then her…

A flawed software update issued by security giant CrowdStrike caused a massive overnight outage to Windows computers around the world, disrupting businesses, airports, train stations, banks, broadcasting stations and the health sector. CrowdStrike said the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, but rather a “flaw” in a software update for its flagship security product, Falcon Sensor, which caused all Windows computers with Falcon installed to crash before fully loading. “The issue has been identified, isolated, and a fix has been distributed,” CrowdStrike said in a statement on Friday. Some businesses and organizations have begun to recover, but many…

OpenAI releases mini versions of its latest AI models. These tiny AI models are intended to be faster and more affordable than the full versions, and are especially useful for simple, high-volume tasks. This makes them appealing to smaller developers who don't need to spend a lot of money on AI costs, but want a relatively lightweight way to incorporate AI into their websites and apps. In this case, OpenAI unveiled its latest flagship model, GPT-4o, in May, where the “o” stands for “omni,” indicating that the model should be able to understand not only text but also audio and…

Businesses around the world have reported IT outages, including Windows “Blue Screen of Death” errors on their computers, making it one of the most widespread IT outages in recent years. The outage is linked to a software update from well-known cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and has affected computers running Microsoft Windows at organizations across a range of sectors, including airlines, banks, retailers, brokerages, media companies and rail networks. Online rumors suggest that the travel industry is the hardest hit. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz acknowledged in a post on X that a “flaw” in content updates for Windows hosts was the cause…

It sounded too good to be true: On Friday morning, as the East Coast woke up to one of the biggest IT outages in history, caused by a glitch in a CrowdStrike update, a rare image went viral on X, garnering millions of views: Sphere, a flashy new addition to the Las Vegas skyline with 580,000 square feet of programmable LEDs on its exterior, appeared to succumb to a blue screen. But a Sphere representative said the photo was digitally altered. Sphere escaped unscathed from the CrowdStrike outage that affected computers running Windows across the global economy. It's easy to…