WhatsApp went down in a major outage affecting the communications app for two hours today. The service started experiencing issues at around 3AM ET, with users greeted with a “connecting” message. WhatsApp web also showed a “make sure your computer has an active internet connection” error. The issues affected users globally, and were resolved around 5AM ET.

“We’re aware that some people are currently having trouble sending messages and we’re working to restore WhatsApp for everyone as quickly as possible,” said Meta spokesperson Joshua Breckman in an initial statement to The Verge.

This was the first major WhatsApp outage since the service went down as part of a massive outage that also took down Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and Facebook last year. That outage took nearly six hours before it was resolved and WhatsApp was back online. Meta, known as Facebook at the time, said that major outage was due to a configuration change to its routers.

WhatsApp outages are still relatively rare, but they have major implications for communications worldwide as the service is used by more than two billion people each month. When WhatsApp went down last year, Brazilian workers’ jobs went with it.

Update, October 25th 10:05AM ET: WhatsApp is now back online.

Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Musk has been clear in the months leading up to his acquisition that he wanted to revamp how Twitter verifies accounts and handles bots. on Sunday, he tweeted: “The whole verification process is being revamped right now.”

The Twitter Blue subscription launched widely almost a year ago as a way to view ad-free articles from some publishers and make other tweaks to the app, such as a different color home screen icon. In the few quarters that Twitter reported earnings as a public company after that debut, advertising remains the vast majority of its revenue. Musk is keen on growing subscriptions to become half of the company’s overall revenue.

Update October 30th at 9:25PM ET: Added detail that existing verified users will

After 10 long years of loving Android, I’ve caved.

After months of going back and forth I went to my local Verizon store and ordered an iPhone 14 Pro. It may sound like I’m being overly dramatic, but the move signaled a big shift for me.

I’ve always prided myself on not buying into the Apple hype. Despite years of pestering from friends to switch to an iPhone, I pushed back, maintaining that I liked being different from the masses. Everyone around me has an iPhone. It felt good to defy the norm. And so for years, I stuck with my Samsung Galaxy devices, which I still believe are incredible phones.

But after conversations with friends and family about what I could get from the iPhone that I could never get with my Android, I started to reconsider my stance. Yes, I loved my Galaxy S10 Plus and everything it offered: a top-notch camera, a customizable interface and Object Eraserwhich removes any unwanted people or objects from your pictures (Pixel has a similar feature). But at the end of the day, there was one big thing my Android could never offer: a seamless way to communicate with all my friends on the iPhone.

I’ve been told countless times that I ruin group chats by turning all the texts “green.” This is because Apple refuses to make iMessage compatible with Android phones, so when you message someone who isn’t on iOS, you’ll see green text bubbles

Image: Mojang

Minecraft 1.20 will be focused on self-expression

Seven new default skins are coming

Now that we have a powerful lens pointed toward the deepest regions of the universe, our definition of “surprise” has slightly altered when it comes to astronomy pics.

It’s no longer surprising, really, when NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals yet another brilliant, ancient piece of the cosmos. At this point, we know to expect nothing less from the trailblazing machine.

Instead, whenever the telescope sends back a jaw-dropping space image, it now elicits more of a “JWST strikes again” feeling. And still, our jaws legitimately drop every single time.

This sort of dissonant version of “surprise” has happened yet again — to a pretty extreme degree. Last week, scientists presented the JWST’s brilliant view of a galaxy cluster merging around a massive black hole that houses a rare quasar — aka an incomprehensibly bright jet of light spwing from the void’s chaotic center.

There’s a lot going on here, I know. But the team behind the find thinks it could escalate even further.

“We think something dramatic is about to happen in these systems,” Andrey Vayner, a Johns Hopkins astronomer and co-author of a study about the scene soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. For now, you can check out a detailed outline of the discovery in a paper published on arXiv.

Especially fascinating about this portrait is that the