Friday news dumps: all the news companies hoped you wouldn’t notice

Someone going by the name “ShinyHunters” has been advertising a 1.3TB cache of data allegedly containing personal data (names, email/home addresses, and phone numbers), credit card details, and other information about 560 million Ticketmaster customers for $500,000 in hacking forums all week.

Now, Ticketmaster parent Live Nation — the company that upset an army of Taylor Swift fans and is facing a federal antitrust lawsuit — publicly acknowledged a data breach in a regulatory filing late Friday evening.

Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches.

The company announced this afternoon that it would leave the smartwatch business and redirect resources to its less-smart goods instead. The company has been one of the most prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence will leave a large gap in the market.

Microsoft is revealing today that it has discovered a nation-state attack on its corporate systems from the same Russian state-sponsored group of hackers that were responsible for the sophisticated SolarWinds attack. Microsoft says the hackers, known as Nobelium, were able to access email accounts of some members of its senior leadership team late last year.

“Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents,” says the Microsoft Security Response Center in a blog post filed late on Friday.

Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app.

“We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” CEO Kevin Systrom says in a blog post. The app is beginning to wind down today. Users can no longer add new comments or posts, and Artifact will still let you read news “through the end of February.”

Joseph Staten, a Bungie veteran who worked on the first three Halo games and was brought on to help get Halo Infinite over the finish line, is leaving Microsoft, the company confirmed to IGN on Friday and Staten himself confirmed on Twitter.

“Hey folks, I am indeed leaving Microsoft,” Staten said. “I’ll have more info to share soon, but for now, I’d just like to thank all my @Xbox colleagues for all their understanding and support as I embark on a new adventure.”

Google is ending support for the Dropcam and the Nest Secure home security system in one year, on April 8th, 2024. They are among the few remaining Nest products that haven’t been brought over to Google Home, and their demise hints that the new Google Home app might almost be here. At least, no more than a year away. Surely.

Google is also winding down the last few legacy Works with Nest connections, but not ‘til September 29th.

Google is cutting approximately 12,000 jobs — the latest technology firm to initiate significant layoffs as inflation rises and global markets brace for a downturn.

Google SEO Sundar Pichai announced the cuts in an email to staff on Friday and a blog post. The job losses constitute around 6 percent of Google’s global workforce, compared to recent layoffs at Microsoft (10,000 jobs or 5 percent of the workforce), Amazon (18,000 jobs / 6 percent), and Meta (11,000 / 13 percent). Earlier this month, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced much smaller cuts at Verily, its health-focused subsidiary, and Intrinsic, a subsidiary developing software for industrial robots.

Wayfair saw a spike in sales at the beginning of the pandemic as customers stayed home and took an interest in renovating their space and shopping online but today announced it’s laying off 870 employees. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the online furniture and home decor retailer indicated that the “workforce reduction” affects 5 percent of its global workforce and 10 percent of its corporate team.

In the company’s second-quarter results released on August 4th, Wayfair reported a decrease in active customers, orders per customer, order deliveries, and a slight decrease in orders delivered via Wayfair’s mobile app and in other areas. Overall, Wayfair saw a nearly 15 percent decrease in net revenue compared to its earnings in 2021.

Peloton CEO Barry McCarthy had his job cut out for him when he took over the helm in February as the company laid off 2,800 employees. Now, roughly six months later, McCarthy has sent out a memo to staffers warning the company plans to eliminate an additional 784 jobs in a third round of layoffs, reports Bloomberg. Peloton will also increase the prices of the Bike Plus and Tread, while shuttering retail showrooms starting in 2023.

Peloton spokesperson Ben Boyd confirmed the news in a statement to The Verge, writing:

Guerrilla Games, the Sony-owned studio most recently known for Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, is shutting down online multiplayer for three games in August (via Polygon). The shutdowns, which will happen on August 12th, will affect Killzone: Mercenary, Killzone Shadow Fall, and Rigs: Mechanized Combat League.

“Online features (including online multiplayer modes) will cease on that date,” Guerrilla wrote in a tweet on Friday. “Single player offline modes remain available.”

News Corp, the media company that owns The Wall Street Journal, said in a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it was the victim of a cyberattack last month. Its security consultant Mandiant, which is investigating the hack, believes the attackers “are likely involved in espionage activities to collect intelligence to benefit China’s interests,” Mandiant vice president of incident response David Wong said in an email to The Verge.

According to the SEC filing, the company discovered in January that one of its cloud-based systems was the target of “persistent cyberattack activity.” A preliminary analysis found that “foreign government involvement may be associated with this activity, and that data was taken.” News Corp. said in the filing that its financial and customer data were not affected and that it believes the threat activity has been contained. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that emails and documents of its journalists were among those targeted in the hack.

Spotify is disbanding its founding podcast studio and laying off some of the team. An affected employee tells The Verge that Studio 4, or Spotify Studios as it’s been referenced externally, consisted of 10 to 15 employees and produced shows like Dissect and Chapo: Kingpin on Trial. Spotify called affected employees on Friday and said their last days would be January 21st. They’ll receive two months’ worth of severance. Some employees were reassigned while others were laid off and pointed to the Spotify job board. The studio’s head, Gina Delvac, was also let go.

Spotify declined to comment. In a note to Spotify staff obtained by The Verge, however, Julie McNamara, head of US studios and video, acknowledged the layoffs and said shutting the studio down would enable the company to “move faster and make more significant progress and facilitate more effective collaboration across our organization.”

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is shutting down its augmented reality game Catan: World Explorers, the company announced on Friday (via Protocol). An AR adaptation of the popular board game Catan announced in 2019, World Explorers was the company’s latest attempt to recreate the magic of Pokémon Go, but soon it’s all coming to an end.

After a year of early access, the game will not be playable after November 18th and Niantic says later today it “will be taking the game down from the App Store and removing real-money purchases from the Shop.” For the players that stick around, the company says it will increase in-game bonuses for the remaining weeks the game is live.

On Friday evening, Twitter issued its first full blog post about what happened after the biggest security lapse in the company’s history, one that led to attackers getting hold of some of the highest profile Twitter accounts in the world — including Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, and more.

The bad news: Twitter has now revealed that the attackers may indeed have downloaded the private direct messages (DMs) of up to 8 individuals while conducting their Bitcoin scam, and were able to see “personal information” including phone numbers and email addresses for every account they targeted.

Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories.

“Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement. “This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others. These decisions are not the result of the current pandemic.”

Zoox, the ambitious self-driving startup said to be worth over $3 billion, laid off almost all of its contract workers last week, including its backup drivers who ride around in the company’s autonomous vehicles. Around 120 people are said to be out of work.

Zoox workers were informed in an email sent on Friday that their jobs were being terminated effective immediately. They were told that they were being locked out of the company’s email, Zoom, and Slack, and would be required to turn in their company-issued laptops and badges. But Zoox also insisted that this should not be “considered a standard layoff.” The company said that it will hire everyone back “once the shelter in place is lifted, unless stated otherwise.” 

GameStop is closing its California retail stores until “further notice,” according to Kotaku, only a day after the video game retailer instructed all of its US employees to disregard coronavirus-related lockdowns. 

“We are closing our stores in California,” GameStop said in a letter to stores leaked to Kotaku. “The closure will remain in effect until further notice as we obtain more information from the California Governor’s Office.” Kotaku also notes that GameStop will not pay its employees during the shutdown, though some may be able to use personal time off.