Former Twitter execs sue Musk over severance
Four former Twitter executives have launched legal action against Elon Musk, alleging the Tesla boss owes them over $128 million in severance payments after he bought the social media firm in 2022.
When Musk bought Twitter, which he has renamed as X, one of his first moves was to sack several executives including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and lawyers Sean Edgett and Vijaya Gadde, according to TechCrunch.
According to the lawsuit, Musk has expressed anger with these executives due to a dispute that arose during thw takeover process. After initially bidding $44 billion for Twitter, Musk tried to back out of the deal, only for the four executives to work hard to force the Tesla billionaire into closing on the agreement.
The lawsuit says Musk claimed that these executives committed “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” in their termination letters, but never was able to show evidence of his allegations. It also quotes Walter Isaacson’s biography of the tycoon, in which Musk allegedly said he would “hunt every single one” of Twitter’s C-suite “till the day they die.”
OpenAI looks to dismiss Musk lawsuit
Speaking of Elon Musk lawsuits, the Tesla boss is facing counter-claims from OpenAI after he launched a lawsuit against the ChatGPT-maker.
Musk, who helped found OpenAI, is suing the company claiming it has abandoned its original mission to help humanity in favour of commercial gain.
In a blog post, OpenAI claimed Musk had previously backed a for-profit structure and even floated the idea of merging the AI firm with his car maker Tesla. Musk left OpenAI in 2018.
OpenAI also published a trove of Musk’s emails to his fellow co-founders to dispute some of his claims, which also include the idea that OpenAI has become a “de facto” subsidiary of major investor Microsoft.
AWS scraps cloud egress fees following Google Cloud’s lead
AWS has agreed to allow its customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem with no so-called “egress fees” attached.
The decision means AWS enterprise customers looking to move their data to another provider will no longer have to pay a significant surcharge which was previously applied to any transfer over 100GB of data per month.
The move follows a similar decision by rival Google who cancelled the cloud migration fees in January for services including Google Cloud, BigQuery, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Filestore, Spanner and Persistent Disk.
AWS’s decision to follow Google’s lead increases pressure on Microsoft – which is the second biggest cloud provider after Amazon, and ahead of Google – to also scrap the fees.
Providers are reconsidering their approach following provisions set out in the European Data Act – which went into effect in January – which aim to promote competition within the cloud industry.
Meta blames technical issue for Facebook and Insta outage
Meta says it has restored full services to Facebook and Instagram after thousands of users worldwide were left unable to access both platforms for several hours on Tuesday.
Blaming a technical issue, the Facebook-owner acknowledged that users had been unable to log on to either the website or app version of some of its services, or to refresh feeds as normal.
Meta also apologised to those who had been affected, saying it resolved the problem as quickly as it could, though it did not disclose what had caused the outage.
Facebook is one of the most-used platforms in the world, with more than three billion active monthly users, while Instagram sees traffic of around 1.4 billion users per month.
According to Cisco’s ThousandEyes intelligence team, the outage was likely caused by a backend issue, such as an authentication problem, Forbes reported.
