Andrew Couts

The social network started experiencing global outages within minutes of Donald Trump posting details of a US military strike on Iran.

Everyone knows what it’s like to lose cell service. A burgeoning open source project called Meshtastic is filling the gap for when you’re in the middle of nowhere—or when disaster strikes.

An email sent by the Department of Homeland Security instructs people in the US on a temporary legal status to leave the country. But who the email actually applies to—and who actually received it—is far from clear.

Plus: Another DOGE operative allegedly has a history in the hacking world, and Donald Trump’s national security adviser apparently had way more Signal chats than previously known.

Plans to redevelop a Northern Virginia warehouse site have long been complicated by the area’s worst-kept secret—the presence of a CIA facility. The GSA put the site up for sale anyway.

Here's how the 1974 Privacy Act is being used in legal battles against DOGE—and how you can protect yourself from government surveillance.

A glitch in Slack makes it possible to accidentally send your entire DM history with one person to other coworkers. Ask me how I know.

Plus: A hacker finds an issue with Cloudflare’s systems that could reveal app users’ rough locations, and the Trump administration puts a wrench in a key cybersecurity investigation.

Plus: Hot Topic confirms a customer data breach, Germany arrests a US citizen for allegedly passing military secrets to Chinese intelligence, and more.

Plus: New details emerge in the National Public Data breach, Discord gets blocked in Russia and Turkey over alleged illegal activity on the platform, and more.

Musk’s now-deleted post questioning why no one has attempted to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris renews concerns over his work for the US government—and potential to inspire extremist violence.

Plus: Meta pays $1.4 million in a historic privacy settlement, Microsoft blames a cyberattack for a major Azure outage, and an artist creates a face recognition system to reveal your NYPD “coppelganger.”

In one of the largest-ever breaches of a US telecom giant, AT&T revealed this week that “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen after hackers accessed its account on a third-party cloud service. That cloud service, Snowflake, has been linked to several recent breaches, including those of Ticketmaster, banking firm Santander, and a subsidiary of LendingTree. Approximately 165 companies may have been targeted in the attacks against Snowflake accounts, potentially making it one…

Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. AWS spokesperson Patrick Neighorn confirmed the company’s investigation of Perplexity following a WIRED inquiry about the startup’s apparent scraping practices. WIRED had previously found that the Perplexity—which has backing from the Jeff Bezos family fund and…

You’ve been asked to serve on the jury in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a United States president. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything. A juror in former president Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in New York was excused on Thursday after voicing fears that she could be identified based on biographical details that she had given in court. The dismissal of Juror 2 highlights the potential dangers of participating in one of the most politicized trials i…

The next time you stay in a hotel, you may want to use the door’s deadbolt. A group of security researchers this week revealed a technique that uses a series of security vulnerabilities that impact 3 million hotel room locks worldwide. While the company is working to fix the issue, many of the locks remain vulnerable to the unique intrusion technique. Apple is having a tough week. In addition to security researchers revealing a major, virtually unpatchable vulnerability in its hardware (more on…

How do you know the internet has a deepfake porn problem? Just look at copyright takedown requests. WIRED found this week that Google is receiving thousands of Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaints for deepfake nudes, most of which are published by just a handful of websites. Experts say the deluge of DMCA takedown requests is evidence that Google should delist the offending sites from search. In Texas, meanwhile, a federal court upheld the state’s age-verification requirements for porn si…

Americans were warned this week about a potential “urgent threat” to the United States, which was later linked to a Russian effort to develop the capability to launch nuclear weapons in space. While no one has disputed the authenticity of the threat, WIRED has learned that the leak was part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to block privacy-focused reforms of a major US surveillance program known as Section 702. The leak, instigated by an email from top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committe…

Ring, the Amazon-owned home surveillance company known for its long history of partnering with police, announced today that it plans to shut down a controversial tool that allows law enforcement to ask users to share their footage without first obtaining a warrant. In a press release announcing its decision, Ring says it will begin “sunsetting” its Request for Assistance (RFA) tool, which allows police to post requests for user surveillance footage to the company’s Neighbors app. Civil liberties…

The official X account of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission was “compromised” this afternoon, resulting in the publication of an “unauthorized” post, according to SEC chair Gary Gensler. The account, @SECGov, also said the account had been compromised. “The SEC has determined that there was unauthorized access to and activity on the @SECGov x.com account by an unknown party for a brief period of time shortly after 4 pm ET,” an SEC spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. “Th…