Several social media websites are experiencing outages on Tuesday morning.
YouTube confirmed that some users are having trouble loading videos on the platform; meanwhile, platforms like Discord and Meta’s Threads, Facebook and Instagram are down as well.
YouTube also shared an update on its X account, which links to the support page.
thanks to everyone who sent notes about loading issues with YouTube: we're on it!
🔍 will follow up here once things are back to normal, you can also follow our Help Community post for details ➡️ https://t.co/4Ezmtku3Em — TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) March 5, 2024The root cause of these widespread outages remains unclear.
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.
Waze is adding a few new features that will help users navigate tricky roundabouts, get alerts when a speed limit is about to change and get warnings about speed bumps and sharp curves.
The new feature is rolling out globally to Android users this month and iOS users later this year.
Users will start to see alerts when a speed limit is about change along their route, giving them more time to adjust their speed.
This update is rolling out globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
These alerts are rolling out now globally to all Android and iOS users this month.
Google has trailed another bundle of product tweaks ahead of Thursday’s deadline for compliance with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Google’s blog post further notes that users “may” see “new consent banners asking them whether they would like to link their Google services“.
The adtech giant is the DMA gatekeeper with by far the largest number of regulated platforms — eight in total; namely: Google Maps, Google Play, Google Shopping, Google Ads, Chrome, Android, Google Search and YouTube.
Elsewhere on data for ads, Google appear to be relying on its advertisers to keep a pipeline of targetable user data flowing through its ad engines.
Some of what Google is trailing in today’s blog post also appears to be re-announcing changes previously announced and/or launched in recent weeks.
Binance will discontinue its naira (NGN) services in response to heightened regulatory scrutiny in Nigeria, it said in a blog post today.
The cryptocurrency exchange will begin delisting any existing NGN spot trading pairs by Thursday, March 7.
Any remaining NGN balances in users’ spot and funding wallets will be converted to USDT on Friday, March 8, it noted.
This development follows recent regulatory actions by the Nigerian government, which imposed restrictions on both local and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance.
What followed was the reported detention of two Binance officials after they were invited to Nigeria to discuss the regulatory restrictions.
MacPaw, which makes Mac and iOS apps, has released a new iPhone app called CleanMyPhone, which helps users free up storage by removing duplicate photos and cleaning up other unwanted images.
Declutter detects and scans your photos to find duplicates, screenshots, screen recordings, TikTok videos, app folders and blurred images.
That’s why you might want to have a look at some of the grouped photos before cleaning them.
In the Uniques category, you might find some images that you can delete.
If you don’t want the app to scan certain images, you can mark them as sensitive.
As remote work becomes increasingly prevalent, organizations globally are adapting, especially regarding onboarding procedures for new employees and navigating cross-border payment complexities.
RemotePass, one such business out of the UAE, has raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by New York-based 212 VC.
CEO Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi founded RemotePass in late 2020 to allow businesses to onboard, manage and pay their talent base in countries where they lack local legal presence.
Several companies are actively facilitating remote work and aiding employees in receiving payments from employers.
“Addressing today’s workforce challenges like talent mobility and remote work, RemotePass stands out as a key enabler.
Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now.
The new feature sounds simple: you register a username and that appears instead of your phone number.
But why do this at all when everyone already has contact names, and Signal is totally private anyway?
That is not just happening in India, we’re seeing a number of jurisdictions where to obtain a phone number, you are required to provide more and more personal information.
But it replaces the phone number when you go to initiate contact.” (Signal does append numbers to chosen usernames to ensure they are unique.)
Pixel phone updatesThe company is now allowing users to capture and upload 10-bit HDR videos on Instagram.
This feature is available to users on the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and Pixel Fold.
Later in the month, the company made the feature available to Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro users.
Google today said the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro users will be able to use this feature soon.
Pixel Watch updatesGoogle is rolling out two updates to the original Pixel Watch to help users train better, namely Pace training and Heart Zone training.
Instagram announced today that it’s rolling out the ability for users to edit their direct messages for up to 15 minutes after sending them.
The ability to edit your DMs lets you fix a typo or change things around if your message doesn’t quite sound right.
To edit a message, you need to press and hold it, and then then choose “edit” from the dropdown menu.
The feature works similar to Apple’s edit feature for iMessage, which launched nearly two years ago.
Instagram also recently started allowing all users to turn read receipts off, for all of their chats or specific ones.
