Global Tech Roundup: Why Twitter Blacked-out on Thursday Evening

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Hi Guys! Another working week has come to an end. There was a whole lot of interesting happenings across the global tech space this week, from Apple’s Hi-Speed to Canon Vision and Amazon’s prime day. There was also news of fundraisings, expansions and acquisitions.

Here is a quick roundup of some of the major stories around the globe you might have missed.

Twitter Suffers Major Outage

During the late hours of Thursday evening, there was a massive Twitter outage as many users were reporting problems of sending tweets and refreshing their timelines.

From users’ accounts, the outage started around 10:30 PM. Several theories trying to explain the outage started making the rounds and one of them was that the Nigerian government has finally decided to censor the internet due to the relentless #EndSARS protests. There have been rumours of a possible internet shutdown by the government.

However, the outage appears to have happened worldwide and not just in Nigeria. Also, Twitter has clarified that there is no evidence of hacking or foul play. It added that it was currently investigating internal causes.

The platform has fully recovered now and a report shows that its full features have returned back to normal around 12 am. Twitter’s last major outage, occurred in February of this year

Apple unveils iPhone 12 with 5G Capability

This week, Apple unveiled its latest flagship smartphone – iPhone 12 at its Hi-Speed event. The device comes in 5 different colours; white, black, red, green and blue.

The new iPhone 12 has 5G capability with two cameras and double the pixel. It is quite thinner, smaller and flatter than the iPhone 11 and has rectangular edges that are similar to that of the early iPhone 4.

Pricing starts at $799. Other announcement at the event includes the new Homepod mini, iPhone 12 Mini and the coming of League of Legends to iPhones.

Suggested read: #AppleEvent: Apple Unveils iPhone 12, Homepod Mini, All With 5G Internet Capacity

Zoom launches OnZoom an event marketplace

During its Zoomtopia user conference this week, Zoom launched OnZoom marketplace, a platform that allows anyone to host and sell tickets for virtual events.

Apart from working as Zoom’s personal Eventbrite, it will also provide features to allow nonprofits and NGOs to accept donations.

Other announcements during the event include’s integration of third-party apps like Asana and Dropbox for a better Zoom experience. It also revealed that end-to-end encryption will start rolling out next week.

Amazon’s Prime Day Sales Crosses Record $10 billion

Amazon’s sixth-annual Prime Day marked yet another record-breaking event for the e-commerce giant. Sales during the two-day period hit $10.40 billion, up from $7.16 billion recorded globally last year, according to Digital Commerce 360 estimates.

The estimates show that sales this year surpassed last year’s by about 45.2%. Marketplace sellers were the biggest winners, selling over $3.5 billion worth of goods during Prime Day.

Amazon’s own products includes private-label goods, Amazon devices and products it buys from manufacturers to sell itself.

According to Amazon, marketplace sellers’ products grew nearly 60%. In comparison, the sales of Amazon’s own products also grew year over year but marketplace sellers grew faster.

Google quietly adds VPN to next Android OS

Android 12 will now include native support for WireGuard. The new VPN which was released earlier this year is one of the biggest things to happen to the VPN industry.

The new protocol contains just 4,000 lines of code compared to OpenVPN’s 100,000 lines of code, making it faster and easier to review than existing VPN protocols.

With the new Android version, Google forks the Linux Kernel release to include “patches of interest to the Android community. A number of new commits were added to the new Android 12-5.4 tree and one of these commits was for the WireGuard VPN protocol.

WireGuard will be available in Android 12 as a simple network device driver and most probably offer other VPN feature like masking of location.

You can check out other news that happened during the week here. Have a nice weekend!!


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