The Verge

On Friday morning, X and Grok went offline for users around the world on both the websites and apps. Outage reports began spiking on DownDetector around 10:00AM ET, while Cisco's ThousandEyes outage map noted over 600 X servers around the world that were having problems. Attempts to load the site with either the Twitter.com or [...]

Is the North American blockade on Chinese EVs softening? Today, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a deal with China to slash tariffs on electric vehicles in exchange for lowering duties on canola products. Canada will initially allow up to 49,000 Chinese EVs at a 6.1 percent tariff, Carney said, though the exact timeline was [...]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In the meantime, some impressive alleged sales figures have gone viral - but they might be too good to be true. This [...]

Several people are gathered around a bleach blond man in a bright pink suit suspended in a clear plastic tube. With a microphone in front of him and a giant sign reading TALK TO ME placed above, "Mike" waits, hands clasped patiently in front of his body, to take questions from his public. "Mike" is [...]

Like trading cards, Lego figures, and even the coveted Labubu, you don't know exactly what your Kodak Charmera camera is going to look like until you open the box. The anticipation and a $30 price tag helped the collectible camera sell out quickly and become nearly impossible to find over the holidays after its debut [...]

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they're going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here. I take my feet seriously. Which [...]

We know how the next-generation Siri is supposed to work. Apple showed it off in 2024, made commercials about it, and generally promised that AI would change the way we used our gadgets forever. And then, well, none of that came to pass. So Apple made a deal: It tapped Google's Gemini technology to help [...]

Several Bluetooth audio devices from companies like Sony, Anker, and Nothing are susceptible to a new flaw that can allow attackers to listen in on conversations or track devices that use Google's Find Hub network, as reported by Wired. Researchers from KU Leuven University's Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group in Belgium discovered several vulnerabilities [...]

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Elon Musk first sued OpenAI in February 2024. Despite OpenAI's repeated attempts to throw it out, the case is now headed to a jury trial on April 27th in [...]

The GPU market is turning into a mess again. Asus told Hardware Unboxed earlier this week that it was winding down production of its RTX 5070 Ti, but the PC maker is now walking back that claim and blaming "incomplete information" from its own Asus PR representatives. "The GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and GeForce RTX [...]

Down the street from the Los Angeles Angels' stadium in Anaheim, a crowd gathers to watch two homes burn. In less than 30 minutes, one structure is reduced to its smoldering, blackened wood frame, while the other, thanks to simple changes to its design, is remarkably unscathed. Of course, this was the point of the [...]

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Last month, Netflix made the surprising decision to kill off a key feature: With no prior warning, the company removed the ability to cast videos from its mobile apps to [...]

Two months before it changed its name to "Meta," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally introduced us to his metaverse for work: Horizon Workrooms, envisioned as a virtual space for workers to collaborate. Today, the company announced it's shutting that space down: "Meta has made the decision to discontinue Workrooms as a standalone app, effective February [...]

After the self-induced tumult Sonos went through last year, I can understand why some people are reluctant to spend money on the company's products. But newly appointed CEO Tom Conrad has shown that he's determined to get back on track and revitalize Sonos as the leading whole-home audio brand. The contentious mobile app is in [...]

In September, Apple launched its latest fleet of smartwatches, including the Apple Watch Series 11, the SE 3, and the Ultra 3. Each wearable offers something a little different (their prices indicate their breadth of features), and we're already starting to see big price drops. Additionally, we're still recommending some recent predecessors in Apple's portfolio, [...]

Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of X owner Elon Musk's children, is suing his company for enabling its AI to virtually strip her down into a bikini without her consent. St. Clair is one of the many people over the past couple weeks who have found themselves undressed without permission by X's AI [...]

There's a new name in charge of stewarding Star Wars at Lucasfilm. The studio just announced that Dave Filoni - best-known for his work on The Mandalorian and The Clone Wars - will be taking over as president. Former president Kathleen Kennedy, whose departure had been rumored for some time, will be stepping down and [...]

Natural Cycles, the company behind a controversial FDA-cleared birth control app, is replacing its thermometer with a wristband that measures skin temperature, heart rate, and movement during sleep. The newly launched wristband costs $129.99 and syncs with the Natural Cycles app, which uses an algorithm to determine a person's "daily fertility status." Users can already [...]

LG might have just revealed its new C6 OLED TVs at CES 2026, but we still don't know when they'll actually hit stores. If you don't want to wait - or spend a couple thousand dollars on a brand new model - the current-gen LG C5 OLED is a fantastic option now the 65-inch model [...]

Spotify is probably one of the most well-known music services available (if not the most popular) around - and it seems that the company it taking advantage of that. As of this month, Spotify announced that it was raising its prices, the third time since 2023. If that concerns you (especially if you're a current [...]

On Thursday, Hardware Unboxed reported that Asus is winding down production of its RTX 5070 Ti, saying, Asus "explicitly told us this model is currently facing a supply shortage and, as such, they have placed the model into end-of-life status." They added that the same applies to Asus's 16GB RTX 5060 Ti, and mentioned how [...]

The US just lowered Taiwan's tariffs in exchange for a massive domestic chipmaking promise, the Commerce Department announced on Thursday. Under the deal, tariffs on goods from Taiwan will decrease from 20 to 15 percent, while Taiwanese technology companies will invest $250 billion into building and expanding chipmaking facilities in the US, supported by at [...]

PUBG developer Krafton has 26 games in development, and in a recent town hall meeting, the company outlined a plan to "focus on its core gaming business while outlining a disciplined approach to building long-term Franchise IPs." "During the past year, KRAFTON has prepared for Franchise IP development by strengthening its creative leadership, as well [...]

Amazon has announced that the servers for New World: Aeternum, one of the company's MMOs, will be shut down on January 31st, 2027. The game will also be delisted and no longer available for purchase starting today, January 15th. Last year, Amazon announced that it would be pivoting away from MMOs to put more of [...]

For an AI loser, Apple did an awful lot of winning last year. The mess that was the Apple Intelligence rollout was embarrassing, to be sure, but through it all, the company kept doing what it does best: selling iPhones. With this week's news that it'll use Gemini models to power the long-awaited smarter Siri, [...]

Elizabeth Warren and other Democrat lawmakers have written an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking for an investigation into alleged "false advertising and deceptive practices" from Trump Mobile. The company first announced its T1 Phone more than six months ago, but is yet to ship a single phone to buyers. The letter [...]

If you know where to look, you can often score deals on Apple's ever-expanding AirPods lineup. Both the AirPods Max and AirPods 4 (with and without ANC) now consistently receive discounts, as do the newer AirPods Pro 3. And while recent shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday delivered some of the steepest discounts [...]

Amazon's data centers will reportedly utilize copper from a mine in Arizona that's leaching metal from ores using microorganisms, the Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon Web Services will be the first customer for Nuton Technologies, which developed the "bioleaching" technology. AWS will also be providing "cloud-based data and analytics support," helping to optimize Nuton's mining [...]

Every year, countless independent films without distribution deals make their debuts on the festival circuit only to disappear into the ether before the general public has had a chance to see them. Pijama, a new VOD streaming service, is trying to change that. Created by filmmakers (and brothers) Juan de Dio and Pablo Larrain - [...]

One of the most controversial issues in the AI industry over the past year was what to do when a user displays signs of mental health struggles in a chatbot conversation. OpenAI's head of that type of safety research, Andrea Vallone, has now joined Anthropic. "Over the past year, I led OpenAI's research on a [...]

If you choose to get an extra controller for your Nintendo Switch 2, you can spend a lot - and get a lot in return. Buying Nintendo's own $89 Switch 2 Pro Controller, for instance, will net you the console's only wireless controller with a 3.5mm headphone jack for private listening, not to mention great-feeling [...]

Raspberry Pi is launching a new add-on board capable of running generative AI models locally on the Raspberry Pi 5. Announced on Thursday, the $130 AI HAT+ 2 is an upgraded - and more expensive - version of the module launched last year, now offering 8GB of RAM and a Hailo 10H chip with 40 [...]

Move over Squid Game: another bleak fictional world is being turned into competitive reality television. In the midst of season 2 of Fallout, Amazon has announced a new series called Fallout Shelter. According to a casting call, the show will put competitors inside of Fallout's iconic vaults and then test their survival skills in a [...]

Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience." Microsoft started [...]

You know a gadget category is starting to go mainstream when patent lawsuits start cropping up. Today, Xreal filed a lawsuit in the US against Viture, alleging the firm is infringing on a patent for its AR glasses technology. According to Xreal's press release, the suit was filed in the United States District Court for [...]

YouTube is now home to the "largest digital library of Sesame Street content" with the arrival of over a hundred older, "classic" episodes of the show, as first announced last year. YouTube's collection of Sesame Street episodes spans the series' history, as the announcement for the streaming launch mentions: "More than 100 full Sesame Street [...]

Subway Surfers City, a follow-up to the popular endless runner mobile game / sludge content star Subway Surfers, will be launching on February 26th on iOS and Android, with preregistration open now. "Building upon the original title, Subway Surfers City brings players home from the franchise's World Tour and into the heart of the Subway [...]

Some of us take a kind of I eat to live" rather than an I live to eat" approach to gadgets. They're tools that help you get things done, not something you want to invest a lot of time or money in. If that's you - and there's no judgment here from a certifiable gadget [...]

Verizon is offering customers a $20 account credit following a massive outage that brought down service across the US on Wednesday. In an update on X, Verizon says you'll receive a text message when the credit is available, which you can redeem by logging into the myVerizon app and accepting it. "Yesterday, we did not [...]

The Ricoh GR IV Monochrome now has a price and is already up for preorder. The dedicated black-and-white camera, based on the standard GR IV with a fixed 28mmm-equivalent lens, will cost $2,199.95 - a $700 premium over the GR IV. Ricoh first announced the GR IV Monochrome was being made back in October, and [...]

Sony has a history of making excellent TVs, from the Trinitron CRTs of last century to the world's first OLED nearly 20 years ago to 2016's ZD9 mini-LED that delivered exceptional brightness and dimming control for the time. And while Samsung beat Sony to the market with the S95B, in 2022 Sony was the first [...]

The best deal that I've seen on The Matrix: 4 Film Deja Vu Collection containing the four main films on 4K Blu-ray discs is $34.99. After missing out on that price around Cyber Monday, I've been waiting patiently for it to return. I can wait no longer to rewatch the 1999 classic, so Walmart's $44.99 [...]

It was an overcast January morning in 2025 the day I decided to delete my operating system. The Ubuntu installer warned me that it would remove everything on my hard drive, permanently wiping the entire Windows 10 installation I'd been running for years at that point. I hesitated for a second - maybe I should [...]

Random access memory, or RAM, is in just about every piece of technology we use. But it's also the technology that AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are using to power the servers in their massive data centers. Now, the world's biggest memory makers - Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron - are taking [...]

Though House of the Dragon tells a different story than Game of Thrones, there are enough tonal similarities to make the spinoff feel more like a remix of its predecessor than a show with its own distinct voice. That's part of what made it a little hard to get excited when HBO first announced that [...]

X is awash with nonconsensual sexual deepfakes that blatantly violate Apple's and Google's policies, yet it and xAI's Grok remain on both companies' app stores. In open letters published Wednesday, a coalition of 28 advocacy groups, including women's organizations and tech watchdogs, are demanding CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai grow spines and evict them. [...]

The price of Spotify Premium is about to jump again in the US, marking its third price hike since 2023. Spotify announced that subscribers in the US, Estonia, and Latvia will be contacted about the updated pricing over the coming month. Individual Premium plans in the US will increase from $11.99 to $12.99 by the [...]

The WeChat channel Documented (or the New York Immigrant Chronicle) is part newsfeed and part public service. The channel, run by the nonprofit newsroom Documented NYC, is filled with local news for Chinese speakers in New York: stories about healthcare and immigration arrests, but also information on local events like toy giveaways, places where families [...]

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Translate, a standalone web translation tool that supports over 50 languages and is positioned as a direct competitor to Google Translate. The two services look visually similar: both feature two text boxes - one for typing or pasting the source text and another that displays the translated results - alongside dropdown [...]

It's been 25 years since the launch of Wikipedia on January 15th, 2001, and it's come a long way from housing just 100 pages to becoming a behemoth of online knowledge with more than 65 million articles that get almost 15 billion views each month. To celebrate, the Wikimedia Foundation - the nonprofit that backs [...]