Meta’s Facebook, Instagram Back Up After Global Outage

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Washington — Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally. The disruptions started at around 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in. “We are aware of the incident and at this time, we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said. At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. “Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X. Meta Platforms, shares of which were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads. Its status dashboard had earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues. Though the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users. Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to …

Nigeria Takes Bold Steps to Erase Digital Gender Gap

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The World Bank says digital entrepreneurship is paving the way for economic empowerment across Nigeria and reducing poverty through internet access. In a January report, the Bank says internet access reduced extreme poverty by 7% in the West African country. But it noted a digital gender gap where women are less likely than men to have internet access. Gibson Emeka reports from Abuja in this report narrated by Mary Alice Salinas. …

Ukrainian YouTuber Finds Her AI Clone Selling Russian Goods on Chinese Internet

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washington — Speaking Mandarin and promoting love for China, countless videos of foreign-looking women made with artificial intelligence started popping up on Chinese social media platforms around the Lunar New Year earlier this month. The avatars in the videos are created with online images that are stolen, reproduced and repurposed so that even the women in real life recognize themselves in the videos. Olga Loiek is one of those women. She’s a 20-year-old Ukrainian who studies cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. A couple of months ago, Loiek started a YouTube channel where she talks about mental health and shares her philosophies about life. However, shortly after that, she started receiving messages from followers telling her that they had seen her on Chinese social media. There, she’s not Olga Loiek but a Russian woman who speaks Mandarin, loves China and wants to marry a Chinese man. Her name is Natasha, or Anna, or Grace, depending on the social media platform you find her on in China. “I started translating the videos with Google Translate, and I realized that most of these accounts are talking about things like China, Russia, how good the relationship between China and Russia is,” she told VOA. “This feels very violating.” In some videos, the avatars talk about how much they value Russia and China’s close ties. In other videos, they praise Chinese history and culture or talk about how much Russian women want to marry Chinese. “If you marry Russian women, we will wash clothes, …

Apple Fined Nearly $2 Billion by European Union Over Music Streaming Competition 

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London — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Monday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc’s competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals. Apple banned app developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app,” said the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm and top antitrust enforcer. “This is illegal, and it has impacted millions of European consumers,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said at a news conference. Apple behaved this way for almost a decade, which meant many users paid “significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said. The 1.8 billion-euro fine follows a long-running investigation triggered by a complaint from Swedish streaming service Spotify five years ago. The EU has led global efforts to crack down on Big Tech companies, including a series of multbillion-dollar fines for Google and charging Meta with distorting the online classified ad market. The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service. Apple hit back at both the commission and Spotify, saying it would appeal the penalty. “The decision was reached despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm, and ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast,” the company said in a statement. It said Spotify stood to benefit from the decision, asserting that the Swedish streaming service that holds a 56% …