US SEC sends letter to Musk over tweets on $44 billion Twitter deal

Twitter experiences longest global outage in years

US Securities and Exchange Commission sent a letter to Elon Musk last month asking for clarification over some of the tweets the billionaire sent about his $44 billion deal for Twitter, regulatory filing showed on Thursday.

Twitter was coming back online on Thursday after an hour-long outage kept thousands of users across the globe from accessing the social media website.

The outage affected nearly 2,000 users as of 9 am ET, down from the peak of 50,000 incidents an hour earlier, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. Social network was completely unavailable to users around world on web and mobile for 45 minutes. 

The incident comes days after Twitter sued Tesla CEO Musk for violating his deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world’s richest person to complete the takeover.

“Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us,” the social media company said in a tweet.

Twitter’s status dashboard showed it was investigating the issue with some of its application programming interfaces. Twitter is hosted on Amazon Web Services and began using Google Cloud Platform as the secondary vendor from 2018, according to Well Fargo Securities analyst Brian Fitzgerald. “It doesn’t seem to be a problem with its cloud vendors as other services continue to run,” Fitzgerald told Reuters.

Twitter had suffered another widespread outage in February that it blamed on a software glitch.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour interruption keeping Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of the reach billions of users in October.

Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter used its popular “Fail Whale” illustration, a beluga being lifted by birds, for such incidents until in 2013 when it discontinued the logo.

Twitter shares were marginally down at $36.51 on Thursday.

Tesla autopilot chief to depart

Tesla’s top artificial intelligence executive and a key figure behind its driver-assistance system Autopilot is leaving the electric-car maker after a months-long sabbatical.

Andrej Karpathy, who joined Tesla in 2017, announced his departure in a series of tweets Wednesday. He was senior director of AI and led the Autopilot computer-vision team that’s tried for years to render the company’s cars capable of driving autonomously.

“It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last five years and a difficult decision to part ways,” Karpathy wrote. “In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.”

The departure adds to a long line of turnover atop the Autopilot group, which has struggled to realise Elon Musk’s autonomous ambitions. The chief executive officer raised billions of dollars in 2019 after telling Wall Street Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road the following year. The shared network of driverless cars Musk described still doesn’t exist, and the systems Tesla markets as Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, or FSD, require fully attentive drivers to keep their hands on the wheel.

The departure of Karpathy, 35, may reflect challenges Tesla is having with FSD and robotaxis, according to Dan Levy, a Credit Suisse analyst with the equivalent of a buy rating on the shares.