Mobile gadget and bag maker Targus says it is experiencing a “temporary interruption” to its business operations following a cyberattack on Friday.
In a notice with regulators on Monday, Targus’ parent company, B. Riley Financial, said it discovered “a threat actor gained unauthorized access to certain of Targus’ file systems,” and shut down much of its network to isolate the incident.
“The incident has been contained and Targus systems recovery efforts are in process,” the statement said.
B. Riley acquired Targus in a 2022 deal worth approximately $250 million.
When reached by email, a spokesperson for B. Riley did not immediately comment.
For the second time in just over a month, Meta’s apps including WhatsApp, and possibly Messenger and Instagram, are facing outages and intermittent issues.
WhatsApp also confirmed the outage in an update to its X account.
(In our own tests, Meta’s apps were loading and we could send messages via WhatsApp which indicates either the outages were not global in nature or they’ve already been fixed.)
This is not the first time Meta’s apps have seen a sizable outage this year.
At the time, Meta’s status page had signaled problems with products like Ads Manager as well.
If patient data has been stolen, the ramifications for the affected patients will likely be irreversible and life-lasting.
Change Healthcare is one of the world’s largest facilitators of health and medical data and patient records, handling billions of healthcare transactions annually.
The cybersecurity director expressed alarm at the prospect of the hackers potentially publishing the stolen sensitive patient data online.
For those on the front-lines of healthcare cybersecurity, the worst-case scenario is that stolen patient records become public.
Do you work at Change Healthcare, Optum or UnitedHealth and know more about the cyberattack?
Discord is back online after an outage this morning, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The outage came as Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and Threads all went down this morning.
YouTube has also confirmed that its service is having issues this morning too, and that it’s working on a fix.
Users reported that they were unable to load messages, while others say said they were unable to access the service at all.
Update 05/05/2024 11:45 AM ET: The article has been updated to reflect that Discord has solved the issue and is back online.
Reports are coming in that a number of Meta’s top social apps, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as its new app Threads, are all experiencing an outage on Tuesday morning.
We’ve reached out to Meta to confirm the timing and the reports and will update if we hear more information.
In the meantime, Meta communications director Andy Stone has confirmed the outage in a post on X, noting, “We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services.
To quell its potential role in influencing the elections’ outcome, Meta disables political ads in the timeframe leading up to key elections, like the U.S. midterms.
To address newer concerns, Meta also announced it would label political ads with AI-generated imagery for the 2024 election cycle.
A spokesperson for Change Healthcare did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Change Healthcare is an American healthcare tech giant and one of the country’s largest processors of prescription medications, handling prescriptions and billing for more than 67,000 pharmacies across the U.S. healthcare system.
The healthcare tech giant handles 15 billion healthcare transactions annually — or about one-in-three U.S. patient records.
Change Healthcare merged with healthcare provider Optum in 2022 as part of a $7.8 billion deal under UnitedHealth Group.
The cyberattack at Change Healthcare began on February 21 early on the U.S. East Coast, causing widespread outages at pharmacies and healthcare facilities.
LoanDepot customers say they have been unable to make mortgage payments or access their online accounts following a suspected ransomware attack on the company last week.
Users on social media and forums discussing the incident say they have struggled to access their account information or submit payments.
LoanDepot’s updating cyber incident page says several LoanDepot customer portals returned online as of Thursday, albeit with limited functionality.
When reached by email, LoanDepot spokesperson Jonathan Fine declined to comment, but did not dispute that the incident was linked to ransomware.
LoanDepot has not yet updated regulators on the company’s recovery since its initial disclosure to the SEC on January 8.
Internet monitoring firms say a near-total internet blackout in Gaza is reaching its seventh day, the longest outage of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict so far.
Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch in a Signal message that this is the “longest internet blackout ever and longer than all of the previous blackouts combined” in Gaza.
On January 12, Palestinian telecom giant Paltel announced that “all telecom services in Gaza Strip have been lost due to the ongoing aggression.
According to NetBlocks, this is the “ninth and longest sustained” telecom’s outage since the onset of the present conflict with Israel.
David Belson, the head of data insight at Cloudflare, which also monitors internet connectivity across the world, told TechCrunch on Thursday that there is an ongoing internet outage in Gaza.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, suffered an outage globally earlier Thursday that lasted for more than an hour.
X Pro, formerly known as TweetDeck, also faced the outage.
This was not Twitter’s first outage – the abrupt workforce cuts earlier exposed the site to more vulnerabilities and reliability issues.
The last major outage on the platform, which was still called Twitter at that time, occurred in early July.
Users encountered “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets” errors.
Many businesses are not adequately protected from the loss of cloud services, which can cause significant financial losses. This is a major issue, as companies collectively spent $61 billion on…
