NewsBytes Briefing: US Senate subpoenas CEOs of Google, Facebook, Twitter
Last night, the US Senate Commerce Committee voted unanimously to issue subpoenas to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The move will see Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey testify before the committee about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which grants a high degree of liability protection to online services from what their users share. Here are other developments.
Twitter hit by a brief outage
After Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter suffered from a brief outage. Users in India, Europe, Japan, and the US reported problems while viewing and sending certain or all tweets. The problem was fixed shortly after surfacing, but the company did not say anything about what exactly caused it in the first place. Previous Twitter outages were reported in 2017, 2018, 2019.
Microsoft launched new hardware
Separately, Microsoft launched two devices last night: Surface Laptop Go and Surface Pro X. The Go model is a sleek notebook that offers a 12.4-inch screen, Intel's 10th-generation i5 quad-core processor, paired with up to 16GB RAM, 256GB storage, and 13 hours of battery life. Pro X is similar to last year's model but has a new SQ2 processor and premium silvery platinum finish.
Over 19,000 Amazon employees contracted COVID-19
Amazon has shared a report that says out of 13,72,000 front-line employees across its 650 sites or Whole Foods, 19,816 tested or were presumed positive for COVID-19 between March 1 and September 19. It says that the figure is much lower than the estimated number of positives considering the rate of infection in the general population as well as age, geographical factors.
Other important developments to note
Among other things, Google announced virtual landmark cues into the AR Mode of Maps and promised to bring back the button to select multiple emails in Gmail after removing it unintentionally. Further, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Retail scored a Rs. 6,247.5 crore investment from Mubadala Investment Company. The Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor will take a 1.40% stake in RRVL as part of the deal.
Finally, some updates on COVID-19
On Thursday, India's COVID-19 tally rose to 63.9 lakh, with over 81,000 fresh infections. Over 1,000 fresh fatalities pushed the death toll to 99,824. To fight the pandemic, ICMR, Biological E announced the development of highly-purified 'Antisera' for COVID-19 prevention and treatment, while Serum Institute said that the trial of Oxford's vaccine has been going on smoothly, with no adverse reactions reported so far.
