Threads goes to 10,000 characters

10,000

Meta’s Threads app is adding a way for users to post up to 10,000 characters using a new feature called “text attachments.”

Currently Threads posts can contain 500 characters, and many times people just post screenshots of longer text. The company said it noticed users posting screenshots of text from books, articles, and podcast transcripts.

Threads competitor X allows users to post up to 25,000 characters, but the feature is only available to paid subscribers. Recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the platform had passed 400 million monthly active users.

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Millie Giles42m

Cloudflare just went down again, but apparently only for 20 minutes this time

Another day, another massive network outage taking down huge sections of the internet... and, once again, the cause of the hiccup was Cloudflare.

On Friday morning, the American IT giant reported that a change made to “how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests” caused its network to “be unavailable for several minutes.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, the company said that “a fix has been implemented,” helping to soothe the stock’s losses after falling as much as 6% in premarket trading, according to Bloomberg. Shares of Cloudflare are trading around 2% lower at the time of writing.

Users reported that sites including LinkedIn, Zoom, Fortnite, Shopify, and Coinbase were all made unavailable by the outage — or at least they would’ve reported that, if Downdetector wasn’t also down, per The Verge. Even so, some are still seeing issues as the service supposedly gets back on its feet.

Cloudflare went down only last month, though that time the network was down for roughly 3 hours and took OpenAI, X, and League of Legends with it — and that incident followed in the digitally disruptive footsteps of Amazon Web Services, which saw a major outage in October lasting some 15 hours.

Jon Keegan14h

Apple poaches Meta’s chief legal officer

Just a day after Meta announced that it had hired away Apple’s user interface design lead, Apple has announced that it’s poached Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, to become Apple’s new general counsel. Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel since 2017, will be retiring late next year.

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Apple announces executive transitions

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Jon Keegan17h

EU calls for bids to build “AI gigafactories” in 2026

The European Union wants to shore up its domestic AI infrastructure and reduce its dependence on American tech companies.

To further this goal, the bloc is planning on accepting bids to build EU-based “AI gigafactories,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

As the AI arms race heats up, countries are racing to secure their own sovereign AI infrastructure, including building their own AI models that reflect their culture and language and offer control over cloud computing resources.

Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia in AI infrastructure. But it may be hard for the EU to fully break free of American tech — unlike the US and China, there is no European alternative for the powerful GPUs needed to train and run AI models. It’s very likely that any AI gigafactories in the EU will be filled with GPUs from Nvidia.

EU to Open Bidding for AI Gigafactories in Early 2026

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

Jon Keegan19h

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.

Alphabet’s AI Chips Are a Potential $900 Billion ‘Secret Sauce’

Rani Molla20h

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space

Billionaires, they’re just like us: they want to bring their terrestrial beefs to outer space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two billionaires have had numerous public feuds over the years that have played out in the courts and on social media. They also both lead AI companies that have insatiable needs for data centers and have publicly discussed building data centers in space.

Altman seems like he thinks this could be more than science fiction. He reportedly reached out to rocket maker Stoke Space to potentially make equity investments in the company to get a controlling stake, though the talks are no longer active, WSJ reports.

Or perhaps he just wanted a Sherwood bobblehead of himself.

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