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Shopify Resolves Outage Disrupting Merchants on Cyber Monday
Shopify experienced a significant outage on Cyber Monday, beginning around 6:45 a.m. PT, which prevented merchants from logging in and using point‑of‑sale systems. The disruption impacted an estimated 4,000 incidents, affecting merchants who collectively handle over 10 % of U.S. e‑commerce transactions. Shopify identified a fault in its login authentication flow, fixed it, and announced recovery while monitoring the platform. Support wait times remain elevated as merchants seek assistance.
YouTube Is Working on a Feature that Will Fix the Messy Home Feed
YouTube is piloting an experimental feature called “Your Custom Feed” that lets users type prompts to shape the videos shown on their home page, aiming to curb the platform’s often‑misaligned algorithmic recommendations. The option appears alongside the standard Home button...
ChatGPT’s Voice Mode Is No Longer a Separate Interface
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT’s voice mode is being integrated directly into the main chat interface, eliminating the need for a separate screen. Users can now speak to the bot and see its responses, including images and maps, in real time...
Microsoft’s AI Chatbot Copilot Leaves WhatsApp on January 15
Microsoft announced that its AI chatbot Copilot will be removed from WhatsApp on January 15, 2026, directing users to its own mobile apps or the web portal. The pull‑out follows WhatsApp’s revised platform policies that bar general‑purpose AI bots from...
Speechify Adds Voice Typing and Voice Assistant to Its Chrome Extension
Speechify has expanded its Chrome extension to include voice typing and a conversational voice assistant that can answer questions about web content. The new dictation feature supports English, corrects errors and filler words, but early testing shows higher word error...
Pocket Casts Now Lets You Create a Playlist of Your Favorite Podcast Episodes
Pocket Casts, the podcast app owned by Automattic, introduced a new Playlists feature that lets users manually or automatically curate episodes in a custom order. The tool includes Smart Playlists with rule‑based filters such as episode length, download status, or...
Former MrBeast Content Strategist Is Building an AI Tool for Creator Ideation and Analytics
Former MrBeast short‑video strategist Jay Neo, together with ex‑Palantir engineer Shivam Kumar and creator Harry Jones, has launched Palo, an AI‑driven platform that offers ideation, analytics and a creator community. Palo ingests a creator’s short‑form video accounts, extracts hooks, sentiment...
As Its Voice Dictation App Takes Off, Wispr Secures $25M From Notable Capital
Voice‑AI startup Wispr raised an additional $25 million in a round led by Notable Capital, bringing its total funding to $81 million after a $30 million round in June. Its dictation app Wispr Flow, now used by 125 enterprise customers including 270 Fortune 500...
Warner Music Settles Copyright Lawsuit with Udio, Signs Deal for AI Music Platform
Warner Music Group settled its copyright lawsuit with AI music startup Udio and simultaneously signed a licensing agreement for a generative‑AI music creation platform slated for launch in 2026. The service will let subscribers remix, cover, and compose new tracks...
YC-Backed Poly Relaunches as a Cloud-Hosted File Storage with AI Search
Poly, a Y Combinator‑backed startup founded by Abhay Agarwal, has relaunched as a cloud‑hosted file storage platform that adds AI‑powered natural‑language search, summarization, translation and organization across text, PDFs, images, audio, video and web links. The service offers 100 GB of...
Security Startup Guardio Nabs $80M From ION Crossover Partners
Cybersecurity startup Guardio announced an $80 million funding round led by ION Crossover Partners, bringing its total capital raised to $127 million and tripling its valuation since a 2021 $47 million round. The company, which now serves 500,000 paying users and generated $100 million...
Mastodon CEO Steps Down as the Social Network Restructures
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko announced his resignation as CEO as the open‑source, decentralized social network transitions to a nonprofit structure governed by a new board that includes Twitter co‑founder Biz Stone and newly appointed Executive Director Felix Hlatky. Rochko will...
Cisco Acquires Translation Startup EzDubs
Cisco announced the acquisition of EzDubs, a Y‑Combinator‑backed real‑time translation startup founded in 2023, though the deal value was not disclosed. EzDubs, which raised $4.2 million in seed funding, will have its technology integrated into Cisco Collaboration, adding live, voice‑preserving translation...
Apple Halves Commissions for Mini App Makers
Apple unveiled the Mini Apps Partner Program, slashing the commission on in‑app purchases for web‑based mini apps to 15% and requiring use of its Advanced Commerce and Declared Age Rating APIs. The program extends the 2017 App Review Guidelines for...
Cash App Debuts a New AI Assistant that Answers Questions About Your Finances
Cash App rolled out a fall update that introduces Moneybot, an AI chatbot that can analyze users' spending, income and savings and suggest actions such as bill splitting or Bitcoin transactions. The assistant launches to a limited user group with...
Productivity App Hero Announces an SDK that Will Complete Your AI Prompts for You
Hero, a productivity startup founded by former Meta engineers, unveiled an invite‑only autocompletion SDK that automatically fills in AI prompts based on user context, from travel bookings to image‑generation parameters. The SDK leverages a series of predictive models to suggest...
Airbnb’s Testing a ‘Kitchen Stocking’ Service that Lets Guests Place Instacart Orders Before Their Stay
Airbnb is piloting a kitchen‑stocking service with Instacart that lets guests order groceries through the Airbnb app up to three weeks before arrival. The trial, limited to Phoenix, Orlando and Los Angeles, pays hosts $25 for each fulfilled order and...
Discord’s Family Center Update Now Lets Parents Monitor Weekly Purchases
Discord has upgraded its Family Center, now allowing parents to view teens' weekly purchases—including Discord Shop items and Nitro subscriptions—alongside time spent on voice/video calls and the top five interacted users and servers. The update also introduces guardian‑only controls for...
Reddit CEO Says Chatbots Are Not a Traffic Driver
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told analysts that AI chatbots are not a major traffic driver for the platform, with Google search and direct visits still accounting for roughly half of its traffic each. The company posted a strong Q3 2025, reporting...
Workout App Ladder Launches Nutrition-Tracking Experience
Strength-training app Ladder has launched Ladder Nutrition, a built-in calorie and macronutrient tracker that lets users log food via photo, barcode scan, text or voice and includes a protein mode, streaks and gamified reminders. The tool uses multiple AI models...
What’s Updog? Datadog’s New Tool Tells You Which Apps Are Down
Datadog launched Updog, a free web dashboard that shows real‑time status of dozens of major SaaS and cloud providers (AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Slack, etc.) and is positioned as a lightweight complement to its paid monitoring tools. Datadog says Updog uses...
UK Designates Apple and Google as Having ‘Strategic Market Status,’ Opening Door for More Regulation
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority has designated Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” for their mobile platforms — covering operating systems, app stores, browsers and browser engines — enabling targeted regulatory interventions to boost competition. After investigations...
Automattic CEO Calls Tumblr His ‘Biggest Failure’ so Far
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called the company’s acquisition of Tumblr his “biggest failure,” saying a planned migration of Tumblr’s more than 500 million blogs to the WordPress back end has been paused because the platform is unprofitable and too...
Strava Eyes IPO as Gen Z Trades Dating Apps for Running Clubs
Strava, the 16-year-old fitness tracking app, is gearing up to go public, the Financial Times reports. CEO Michael Martin told the FT that the San Francisco company plans to list “at some point,” eyeing capital for more acquisitions. The company,...
