Kategorie

Among a range of factors leading to a wave of tech sector layoffs in 2026 is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and automation. Companies are reconfiguring their workforces to leverage AI for increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. This realignment and reduction is implemented even by companies reporting strong financial performance.

But it’s not just AI leading to workforce cuts. Complementing this technological shift are ongoing economic uncertainty, inflation, and higher interest rates, compounded by a chip shortage and rising energy costs. This mix is driving companies to cut costs and streamline operations for increased efficiency.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, an online tracker that keep tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 139,004 tech employees have been laid off at 345 companies so far in 2026, compared to the 122,606 layoffs it reported in 2025.

Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.

Notable tech layoffs in 2026

• Canva
• Oracle (again)
• Monday.com
• Microsoft
• Meta
• Cisco
• Cloudflare
• Oracle
• Atlassian
• Salesforce
• Amazon
• Ericsson

Nov. 3, 2026: Canva lays off 22% of staff as it flattens org chart and consolidates teams

Canva didn’t explicitly blame AI for a massive round of lay-offs that will see 1,271 staff, over one-fifth of its workforce, lose their jobs, but CEO Melanie Perkins did give a nod to how “New technology is transforming what people can create, how they create it, and what they expect from the products they use” in an open letter outlining the changes. To simplify and speed up decision-making around product development, she wrote, Canva is folding its product, growth, and platform teams into a single product organization, removing layers of middle management, reducing specialization by giving staff broader responsibilities, and requiring staff to show up more often at its office in Sydney, which will become the hub for product development.

Sept. 15, 2026: Oracle forecasts 33% increase in restructuring costs as new round of layoffs hits

Oracle began a new round of layoffs this week, sending early-morning termination emails to staff for the second time in six months. Oracle has made no public statement confirming the latest round of job cuts, but in a regulatory filing days earlier the company said it had set aside a further $700 million for restructuring charges, bringing the total charges this year to roughly $2.8 billion.

July 22, 2026: Monday.com cuts 20% of its workforce to restructure for the AI era

The company says the decision to cut 620 jobs isn’t about margins, but about creating a flatter organization built around AI agents, autonomous teams, and deeper customer engagement.

July 6, 2026: Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, primarily in sales and Xbox teams

As the company trims thousands of jobs, it’s also investing in embedded engineering teams and AI infrastructure. The layoffs come several weeks after the company offered 8,750 US employees voluntary retirement buyouts.

June 5, 2026: Tech industry cut 38,242 jobs in May, worst since 2024

AI was blamed for 40% of the job cuts in May, up from 7% in January, according to research by employment placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

May 20, 2026: Meta cuts 8,000 jobs, around 10% of workforce

The cuts are expected to expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams the hardest, arriving as Meta pivots toward AI to boost efficiency across its organization, according to Yahoo Tech.

May 13, 2026: Cisco to cut nearly 4,000 jobs despite strong growth in AI, enterprise networking

Despite reporting positive financial news — including record third-quarter revenue of $15.8 billion, a 12% year-over-year increase — Cisco said it will eliminate almost 4,000 jobs.

May 7, 2026: Cloudflare to cut 1,100 jobs in AI-focused restructuring

About 20% of Cloudflare’s global workforce will be culled as the company pivots for the agentic AI era, Reuters reported.

April 1, 2026: Oracle to cut up to 30,000 jobs globally, putting enterprise support and roadmaps at risk

Oracle began laying off employees on March 31 in what could be the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. Employees received termination emails at 6 a.m. local time with immediate system lockouts and no prior warning. (Note: in June, CNBC put the final layoff tally at 21,000.)

March 12, 2026: Atlassian cuts 1,600 jobs to fund AI and enterprise expansion

Atlassian will reduce its global workforce by approximately 10%, eliminating around 1,600 roles, as the collaboration software maker redirects capital toward artificial intelligence development and enterprise sales.

March 11, 2026: Tech layoffs surpass 45,000 in early 2026

A recent analysis by RationalFX found 45,363 job cuts globally so far this year—with roughly 68% or more than 30,000 occurring in the U.S. — highlighting ongoing workforce cuts even as many tech companies report strong revenue growth.

Feb. 10, 2026: Salesforce lays off staffers as executive leadership churn continues

Salesforce has reduced close to 1,000 roles earlier this month across teams, including marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit, Business Insider reported, quoting employees familiar with the matter.

Jan. 23, 2026: Amazon layoffs expected to disproportionately hit AWS and tech talent

As the market slows down, AWS and other Amazon units are preparing for another round of layoffs, which is expected to overwhelmingly impact tech talent. An email from HR leader Beth Galetti on Jan. 28 confirmed 16,000 job cuts.

Jan. 15, 2026: Ericsson plans to shed 1,600 jobs in Sweden

 Ericsson lans to cut some 1,600 jobs in Sweden, the telecommunications equipment maker said doubling down on recent cost-saving measures that have helped it weather a prolonged downturn in telecoms spending, Reuters reports.

Jan. 13, 2026: Meta plans to cut around 10% of employees in Reality Labs business

Meta plans to cut around 10% of the employees in its Reality Labs division who work on products including the metaverse, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, according to The New York Times.

Layoffs in 2025

• Cisco
• Oracle
• Windsurf
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Crowdstrike
• HPE
• Autodesk
• HPE
• CISA
• Workday
• Salesforce
• Meta

Global tech-sector layoffs surpass 244,000 in 2025

Economic uncertainty, elevated interest rates, and AI adoption have driven workforce reductions across tech companies worldwide, according to a RationalFX report.

October 28, 2025: Amazon to cut 14,000 jobs across company

Amazon will reduce its overall workforce by 14,000, cutting layers of management across the company and hiring in some areas to support its “biggest bets”.

August 18, 2025: Cisco and Oracle to cut hundreds of Bay Area jobs

Tech companies Cisco and Oracle are cutting hundreds of jobs across the Bay Area. Cisco will eliminate 221 positions at its Milpitas and San Francisco offices, effective Oct. 13. Oracle is reducing 101 positions in Santa Clara on the same date 

August 5, 2025: 3 weeks after acquiring Windsurf, Cognition offers staff the exit door

Cognition, the AI coding startup that acquired rival company Windsurf three weeks ago, laid off 30 employees last week and is offering buyouts to the roughly 200 remaining employees on the team, reports The Information.

July 25, 2025, Intel to lay off 22% of workforce, CEO Tan signals ‘no more blank checks’

Intel will reduce its workforce to 75,000 employees by the end of 2025 as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan implements sweeping changes designed to transform the struggling chipmaker

July 8, 2025, Intel layoffs begin: Chipmaker is cutting many thousands of jobs

Intel has begun laying off employees across the company. CEO Lip-Bu Tan told workers back in April to expect major layoffs at Intel in the coming months as the chipmaker slashes costs and overhauls its organization after years of technical setbacks and falling sales.

July 2, 2025: Microsoft will cut 9,000 workers

Microsoft will lay off about 9,000 employees, a source familiar with the workforce cut told CNBC.  The cuts will reportedly affect less than 4% of Microsoft’s global workforce and will impact different teams, geographies and levels of experience. This is the latest in a string of cuts the tech giant has made this year.

June 17, 2025: Intel looks to factory layoffs to return to profitability

Intel will lay off up to 20% of its manufacturing sector employees starting in July, according to media reports, as the company looks for options as it seeks a return to profitability. The cuts reportedly will be made around the world, but some of the layoffs will be closer to home, according to a report in The Oregonian citing an internal company memo from Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekaran.

May 7, 2025: CrowdStrike to lay off 5% of staff

CrowdStrike announced a plan to cut about 500 roles, roughly 5% of its workforce, to streamline operations and reduce costs. The cybersecurity company will incur about $36 million to $53 million in charges related to the layoffs

March 6, 2025: HPE cuts 2,500 jobs, remains committed to Juniper buy

CEO Antonio Neri told Wall Street analysts that HPE would begin implementing a cost-cutting program involving layoffs of about 2,500 employees over the next 18 months. HPE employs about 61,000 people worldwide.

Feb. 27, 2025: Autodesk to lay off 9% of workforce

Software maker Autodesk is laying off 1,350 staff. With the rise of subscription and multi-year contracts billed annually, and self-service enablement, it finds it needs fewer sales staff, CEO Andrew Anagnost said in a message to employees. And with its cloud, platform, and AI products proving most profitable, it’s concentrating its staff and investments there.

Feb. 27, 2025: HP to lay off 2,000 more

As part of an ongoing restructuring, HP plans to lay off up to another 2,000 workers. In recent weeks, the company has tried — unsuccessfully — to do away with telephone support staff by forcing callers to wait for at least 15 minutes if they refuse to use self-service support resources online. The company swiftly backtracked, but wider job cuts are still on.

Feb. 21, 2025: CISA lays off 130

Government employees get laid off too: In this case, 130 workers at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are being shown the door as a result of a DOGE decision. Cybersecurity experts are concerned that the cuts will harm the international collaborations that CISA has fostered, quite apart from their concerns about the security of the DOGE layoff process itself.

Feb. 5, 2025: Workday lays off 1,750

As it moves to invest more in AI and international growth, Workday is laying off 8.5% of its workforce and disposing of unused office space. Some analysts fear the cutbacks will affect the company’s customer service — unless AI can pick up the slack.

Feb. 4, 2025: Salesforce lays off over 1,000

At the same time as it’s hiring sales staff for its new artificial intelligence products, Salesforce is laying off over 1,000 workers across the company, according to Bloomberg. As of June, 2024, the company had over 72,000 employees, according to its website. Salesforce did not comment on the report. In 2024 the company reportedly laid off around 1,000 staff too, in two waves: January and July.

Jan. 14, 2025: Meta will lay off 5% of workforce

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees he intended to “move out the low performers faster” in an internal memo reported by Bloomberg. The memo announced that the company will lay off 5% of its staff, or around 3,600 staff, beginning Feb. 10. The company had already reduced its headcount by 5% in 2024 through natural attrition, the memo said. Among those leaving the company will be staff previously responsible for fact checking of posts on its social media platforms in the US, as the company begins relying on its users to police content.

Tech layoffs in 2024

• Equinix
• AMD
• Freshworks
• Cisco
• General Motors
• Intel
• OpenText
• Microsoft
• AWS
• Dell

Nov. 26, 2024: Equinix to cut 3% of staff

Despite intense demand for its data center capacity, Equinix is planning to lay off 3% of its workforce, or around 400 employees. The announcement followed the appointment of Adaire Fox-Martin to replace Charles Meyers as CEO and the departures of two other senior executives, CIO Milind Wagle and CISO Michael Montoya.

Nov. 13, 2024: AMD to cut 4% of workforce

AMD will lay off around 1,000 employees as it pivots towards developing AI-focused chips, it said. The move came as a surprise to staff, as the company also reported strong quarterly earnings.

Nov. 7, 2024: Freshworks lays off 660

Enterprise software vendor Freshworks laid off around 660 staff, or around 13% of its headcount, despite reporting increased revenue and profits in its fourth fiscal quarter. The company described the layoffs as a realignment of its global workforce.

Sept. 17, 2024: Cisco lays off 6,000

After laying off around 4,200 staff in February, Cisco is at it again, laying off another 6,000 or around 7% of its workforce. Among the divisions affected were its threat intelligence unit, Talos Security.

Aug. 20, 2024: General Motors lays off 1,000 software staff

More than 1,000 software and services staff are on the way out at General Motors, signalling that it could be rethinking its digital transformation strategy. In an internal memo, the company said that it was moving resources to its highest-priority work and flattening hierarchies.

August 1, 2024: Intel removes 15,000 roles

Intel plans to cut its workforce by around 15% to reduce costs after a disastrous second quarter. Revenue for the three months to June 29 stagnated at around $12.8 billion, but net income fell 85% to $83 million, prompting CEO Pat Gelsinger to bring forward a company-wide meeting in order to announce that 15,000 staff would lose their jobs. “This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history,” Gelsinger wrote in an email to staff, continuing: “Our revenues have not grown as expected — and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both — particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

July 4, 2024: OpenText to lay off 1,200

OpenText said it will lay off 1,200 staff, or about 1.7% of its workforce, in a bid to save around $100 million annually. It plans to hire new sales and engineering staff in other areas in 2025, it said.

June 4, 2024: Microsoft lays off staff in Azure division

Microsoft laid off staff in several teams supporting its cloud services, including Azure for Operations and Mission Engineering. The company didn’t say exactly how many staff were leaving.

April 4, 2024: Amazon downsizes AWS in a fresh cost-cutting round

Amazon announced hundreds of layoffs in the sales and marketing teams of its AWS cloud services division — and also in the technology development teams for its physical retail stores, as it stepped back from efforts to generalize the “Just Walk Out” technology built for its Amazon Fresh grocery stores.

April 1, 2024: Dell acknowledges 13,000 job cuts

Dell Technologies’ latest 10K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed that the company had laid off 13,000 employees over the course of the 2023 fiscal year; it characterized the layoffs and other reorganizational moves as cost-cutting measures. “These actions resulted in a reduction in our overall headcount,” the company said. A comparison to the previous year’s 10K filing, performed by The Register, found that Dell employed 133,000 people at that point, compared to 120,000 as of February 2024. Dell announced layoffs of 6,650 staffers on Feb. 6, but it is unclear whether those cuts were reflected in the numbers from this year’s 10K statement.

See news of earlier layoffs.

Until now, Microsoft Excel has followed a strict structural rule: each cell on a worksheet can hold only a single scalar value. While you can string together text using commas or write dynamic array formulas to spill values across adjacent rows and columns, the cell itself remains a single-item container.

But Excel has evolved. A feature currently in preview lets you store multiple distinct, structured values within a single cell.

Three new data structures can now be put inside a cell:

• A list maintains a sequence of independent values arranged in a single column. Unlike a plain text string separated by commas, an in-cell list treats each entry as a distinct data element. A list cell can hold a mix of text, numbers, dates, and Boolean values while preserving the native data type of each item.
• An array stores a grid of rows and columns inside one cell.
• A nested array allows formulas to generate and return arrays inside other arrays. This allows complex outputs to be confined within individual cells instead of trying to spill them across adjacent worksheet rows and columns.

These in-cell data structures can simplify complex formula processing and reduce clutter on the worksheet.

Availability: These in-cell data structures are available in Excel for Windows and Mac to members of the Microsoft 365 Insider program who are on the Beta Channel. Microsoft has not yet said when the features will begin rolling out to all M365 subscribers, and they are not supported in perpetual license versions (such as Office 2021 or Office 2024) or Excel for the web.

Use cases

Here are examples of how these three in-cell structures can be used.

Multi-item categorizing

Imagine categorizing your co-workers, who each have expertise in using up to five M365 software tools: Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Or they specialize in selling any number of categories of products.

To store this information on a spreadsheet, you could designate a column for each software tool or product category. This of course can take up a lot of columns on the spreadsheet, especially if you have additional columns containing more information about each person.

Instead, with an in-cell list, you can store all this information in one column. Excel will recognize each list item individually.

These in-cell lists eliminate the need for multiple columns.

Howard Wen / Foundry

This allows you to filter for one or a combination of these items by clicking the drop-down arrow at the top of the column containing the in-cell list.

Because Excel recognizes each item in an in-cell list individually, you can filter the results by the individual items.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Survey responses contained

Say your co-workers or customers are filling out a survey where they rate questions on a numerical scale. Instead of allocating separate columns for each survey question per person, you can store all responses within a single designated cell per respondent. This helps keep the rest of the spreadsheet look cleaner, especially if you’ve designed it with other columns to store additional data about each person.

Mitigating #SPILL! errors

When using array-processing functions like TEXTSPLIT across an entire column, standard dynamic arrays attempt to spill output values sideways across multiple columns for every row simultaneously. If any blocking data exists in adjacent cells, Excel triggers a #SPILL! error.

The array in cell G1 is trying to spill into cell G2, which already has a value.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Instead, Excel can pack the split outputs inside each respective row’s cell as a nested array. This produces a single-column result that holds all detailed split values internally without spilling across adjacent grid cells or causing formula collisions.

The array is now contained in a single cell, eliminating the spill error.

Howard Wen / Foundry

How to insert and edit in-cell structures

You can create and interact with in-cell data structures using manual shortcuts or dynamic formulas:

• List: Select a cell and press Ctrl + J to open the in-cell list editor, or navigate to Insert > List on the ribbon toolbar. Then type or paste items separated by commas or line breaks.
• Array: You can create an array using curly braces {} and semicolons or commas. For example, ={1;2;3} creates a standard array that spills across cells. Wrapping it in a second set of braces as in ={{1;2;3}} keeps it contained in a single cell. Likewise, wrapping a formula like =TEXTSPLIT(B3,, “, “) in extra braces as in ={TEXTSPLIT(B3,, “, “)} will contain the entire resulting array inside a 1×1 container in the cell, suppressing spilling.
• Nested Array: You can create nested arrays by enclosing multiple arrays within curly braces, such as ={{1,2,3};{4,5,6}}. This builds more complex data structures with multiple rows and columns.

Unpacking and referencing: When standard formulas reference an in-cell structure directly (for example, =B6 where cell B6 contains a list or array), Excel spills the internal array into adjacent cells on the worksheet grid. To extract specific elements without spilling, use array manipulation functions like INDEX or field access operators.

Typing =F2 in cell H2 references all the individual items in cell F2.

Howard Wen / Foundry

Caveats, new functions, and tips

Things consider when using these new in-cell data structures:

• Reduced visual transparency: Traditional spreadsheet grids display all data directly, which makes them efficient to analyze. Implementing these structures inside cells requires users to interact with them in order to view full details, which can slow auditing.
• Performance, storage, and memory: Memory consumption of in-cell arrays is somewhat higher and calculation performance can be slower compared to storing single-value data.
• Backward compatibility: A worksheet that contains these new in-cell structures will show formula errors when opened in older desktop, perpetual license, or other unsupported versions of Excel.
• Collaboration: To prevent confusion, make sure anyone collaborating on a worksheet knows that you’ve implemented in-cell lists or arrays in it, especially if they are likely to encounter compatibility issues with their version of Excel.
• Compatibility Version 3 and new functions: Compatibility Version 3 is required for most calculations involving nested arrays. (Set via Formulas > Calculation Options.) Additionally, four new functions have been added for array evaluation: FLATTEN unpacks nested arrays into grid rows/columns, and HAS, HASANY, and HASALL check whether specific values exist within an array.
• Legacy function limitations: Traditional aggregation and lookup functions like SUMIF, COUNTIF, and VLOOKUP may not inspect or evaluate values stored inside multi-value cells without array-handling wrappers or modern replacement functions such as XLOOKUP or BYROW.

Finally, because these features are in preview, Microsoft warns that their behavior may change based on feedback from M365 Insiders before general release.

A large-scale watering hole attack associated with Russian hackers has been targeting iOS and Android users visiting compromised sites or fake ones impersonating legitimate portals. [...]

Russian authorities have arrested three suspected members of a threat group known as VasyGrek and dismantled its criminal infrastructure. Also known as Fluffy Wolf, the threat actor has a history of targeting Russian and international companies since 2016. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD) said members of the group are "suspected of embezzling funds from the Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

A critical Android flaw could allow an attacker to run code on a phone without any user action remotely, Google said in its November security bulletin. The flaw, CVE-2026-58868, affects Android 14 through 17. Phones get the fix with security patch level 2026-11-01 or later, which phone makers and carriers send on their own schedules. As of November 4, Google's bulletin did not report Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a security flaw in WordPress Core to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-119977 (CVSS score: 8.1), is a case of Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Investors back Journify’s push into the US and Europe

Journify, the ad signal infrastructure company, today announced a $12 million Series A at four times its previous valuation. Al Mada Ventures led the round, co-led by returning investor Silicon Badia, with Shorooq and Bunat Ventures increasing their investment and Du Ventures and Oraseya Capital joining as new investors. The funding will take Journify into the US and Europe and expand the AI behind its platform.

Global ad spend will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, with algorithms expected to place three quarters by 2028, according to dentsu. These systems learn from the customer outcomes brands send back. Browser restrictions, broken tracking, and disconnected offline sales leave them with an incomplete picture of who buys.

Journify makes sure ad platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap and Amazon Ads see the purchases, sign-ups and store sales a brand’s customers actually make. More than 100 businesses use Journify today, from fast-growing ecommerce brands to some of the region’s largest retailers, representing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual ad spend.

Customers include Jarir Bookstore, one of Saudi Arabia’s largest retailers, which increased its return on ad spend on Meta by 182%, and Saudi ecommerce brand Baytonia, which grew its return on ad spend on TikTok by 80% while cutting cost per purchase by 44%.

“AI is transforming advertising, but the intelligence behind it is only as good as the signals it receives,” said Taoufik El Jamali, Co-Founder and CEO of Journify. “Businesses know who buys, who comes back and what creates lasting customer value. Too little of that knowledge reaches the ad platforms driving their growth. Our vision is to close that gap, turning real customer outcomes into intelligence ad platforms can learn from. We’re building toward a future where advertising AI understands what makes a customer valuable to each business, not just what makes them click.”“As AI takes on a greater role in marketing, we believe the connection between reliable customer data and the decisions built on it will become increasingly valuable,” said Omar Laalej, Managing Director at Al Mada Ventures. “What interests us about Journify is its approach to building that connection from the data layer up: a privacy-first foundation that can evolve into intelligence and action. The founders’ understanding of that opportunity gives us confidence in their ability to build a platform that marketers can increasingly rely on, both to understand their customers and to act on that understanding.”Hossam Shafick, Partner at Silicon Badia, Seed Lead and returning investor, added, “Since our initial investment, Journify has grown its valuation by more than 4x, and its revenues more than 5x, validating both the strength of its technology and the team’s ability to execute at scale. That performance has deepened our conviction that Journify can become a global leader in ad signal infrastructure. We are proud to double down and co-lead this round as the company expands into the world’s largest advertising markets.”

Journify already uses AI to monitor every connection continuously, detect signal-quality issues and fix them. The new funding will grow those capabilities as Journify expands beyond the GCC. In the US alone, digital advertising revenue reached $294.6 billion in 2025, according to IAB and PwC.

“I’m excited to help Journify scale in the biggest ad market in the world,” said Ryan Burke, a newly appointed member of Journify’s board and three-time Chief Revenue Officer. “I’ve known Taoufik since our InVision days, and I’ve seen his product execution in action. Based on the success they’re already seeing in the Middle East, it’s not a question whether it works in the US, but how fast we can scale.”

About Journify

Journify builds ad signal infrastructure for performance marketers. Its privacy-first, real-time data layer helps brands improve the quality and reliability of the first-party signals used in advertising and measurement.

Journify connects data across web, mobile, offline sales, CRM, ecommerce platforms, backend systems and data warehouses. It validates and enriches conversion events and activates consented signals server-side across Google, Meta, TikTok, Snap, Amazon Ads and other platforms.

Founded in 2022 by Taoufik El Jamali, Amine Chouki and Omar Al Shoubaki, Journify is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Dubai and Riyadh. Learn more at journify.io.

Journify has obtained a SOC 2 Type II report and is committed to GDPR compliance.

Contact

Head of Marketing

Vanessa Moreno

Journify

[email protected]

Chainlit helps developers turn an AI model into a chat app, but it no longer receives security updates.

Apache Arrow gives data tools a shared way to organize information.

Attackers have compromised the update infrastructure for the cPGuard web security suite to distribute a backdoor and a data-stealing script. [...]

Developer platform WorkOS suffered a data breach after a threat actor accessed business contact records and summaries of customer communications. [...]

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance says North Korean hackers used a fake job interview to trick an employee into installing malware that ultimately let them compromise the company's wallet infrastructure and steal about $6.34 billion in digital assets. [...]

Large language model hijacking attacks, also known as LLMjacking, are generating large fraudulent cloud charges, with some organizations losing more than $100,000 per day. [...]

Customers of the mSecure password manager are being urged to act now to protect the confidential information they store in it, possibly by changing passwords, resetting two-factor authentication (2FA), and removing passkeys. The warning came in an email sent on November 3 in the name of developer mSeven Software. It says the company recently learned of suspicious activity linked to the app but Swati Khandelwalhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Blockchain infrastructure provider Chainstack on Tuesday disclosed that it was targeted in a cyber attack that allowed an unauthorized party to gain access to some parts of its infrastructure. The incident is assessed to be part of a large-scale, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered attack campaign that came to light last week. "An external attacker gained unauthorized access to part of Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

While delivering record Q4 revenue, Apple’s financial results revealed a $33 billion cost associated with memory price inflation, representing the true cost of the growing bubble of AI data center investments. 

The results also showed something that threatens those same data center investments — a sea change in how enterprises are approaching AI. Inference costs, security, and data governance concerns may finally be dampening enthusiasm for cloud-based AI services.

Enterprises go local

Apple revealed several major enterprise clients who are turning to its products as solutions for local inference. The company told us that Gap Inc. is running AI loss-prevention models entirely on Mac minis to eliminate cloud token costs, while world-famous auction house Christie’s is using Mac Studio to run local pricing estimate models.

Apple’s wider enterprise wins matter too. It told analysts and investors that as well as purchasing 25,000 iPads for pilots and mechanics, American Airlines is deploying over 37,000 iPhone 17 devices to flight attendants for in-flight purchases with Tap-to-Pay. In education, it revealed a huge deal with the Department of Education in the Philippines, which will deploy 170,000 MacBook Neos to teachers and staff.

All these deployments help the company build up its mindshare, which should translate into future customer success and help it stay relevant in fast-changing times. But it’s really Apple’s pivot into AI that is tempting business users to make these purchases. 

The hardware and the economics

It’s not trivial that the company’s M-series and A-series processors are highly performant. It matters that you can patch together four Macs to create a powerful on-premises AI system more than capable of handling even highly complex AI calculations. 

“From Mac to iPhone to iPad, we are proud that our products are the best platforms in the industry for AI for both first-party and third-party applications, and we’re excited about the opportunities that creates,” CEO John Ternus said.

Look at it this way: If a Mac costs a few thousand bucks but can deliver the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars of inferencing tokens during its lifespan, then it’s a bargain, not a cost. What Apple confirmed is that at least some enterprise purchasers are paying attention to this.

Monetizing both ends

Of course, the other side to AI is the need to build it, so it also matters that when it comes to the deployment of its AI APIs from within applications created by third-party developers, Apple is providing a lot more clarity. It is giving developers building apps with under two million downloads direct access to its powerful server-side LLMs completely free of token costs, it said.

It has also introduced a three-tiered system for developers needing to use its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. The company is also putting a little more flesh on its plans to charge end user customers for heavy access to its server-side queries through iCloud+. 

What that means is that while delivering hardware capable of running on-device AI, Apple is also building an end user market for AI inferencing the Apple way, and equipping developers with the tools they need to attract end users to make use of its inferencing capacity in the first place. It is monetizing both ends of the story, while also enabling all parties to build success.

That’s not just about building and maintaining AI relevance for Apple. It’s also about building up new business opportunity. Ternus pretty much confirmed this, telling analysts during the Q4 financial call, “in the beginning, iCloud tiers were largely about storage, but we’ve been adding more capabilities and features to it.”

Siri agentic AI

Ternus also talked up Siri AI. “With Siri AI, we really have the kind of the Siri that we always wanted,” he said. “It’s primarily request-based today, but as we talked about at WWDC, it’s built on a modern orchestrator-driven architecture that gives us real room to expand its capabilities over time. As far as agentic capabilities, we think these are promising tools for users. We just want to make sure that users are aware of what they’re giving access to.”

Now please subscribe to my daily, human-curated Apple-related news headline feed at The Core, or follow me on BlueSky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon.

Binance on Tuesday said the record-setting theft of $6.43 billion in assets from the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange was the culmination of a "sophisticated, multi-stage campaign" that involved the use of a tampered Homebrew installation and recruitment-themed social engineering attack targeting two of its engineers. "It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident," Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

In 2023, malware tracked as BlackLotus became the first publicly documented in-the-wild UEFI bootkit capable of bypassing Secure Boot on fully updated Windows 11 systems. With the industry-wide chain-of-trust mechanism subverted, the malware was able to run malicious code before Windows was fully loaded and many security defenses were operational.

Microsoft had already patched the vulnerability that BlackLotus exploited in 2022. In 2023 and 2024, Microsoft issued additional updates. The first added a new certificate that no longer trusted the vulnerable boot managers. The second provided the means to revoke trust in the digital certificate used to sign older vulnerable Windows boot managers. The organizations infected by the new bootkit, which is tracked under the name BlackX, had installed all of these patches. So how did they fall victim?

UEFI bootkit refresher

Before discussing the incident further, a brief review of BlackLotus and UEFI malware is in order. Short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, UEFI is firmware that runs immediately after a computer is turned on. One of its main jobs is to load system configuration settings, identify and initialize hardware components, and prepare the computer to start its OS.

Read full article

Comments

Barracuda has disclosed details of two vulnerabilities affecting its products that, if chained together, could allow an attacker to bypass authorization controls and gain root access to a susceptible device. The vulnerabilities, a pre-authentication authorization bypass vulnerability and a command injection vulnerability, have been assigned the CVE identifiers CVE-2026-116606 (CVSS score: 9.3) Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Google on Monday warned that threat actors are hijacking enterprise access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to fraudulently leverage expensive computing resources and AI services. The tactic is called LLMjacking, a form of resource hijacking adapted for the LLM era, where an attacker obtains an API key through phishing, source code leaks, misconfigured environments, or exposed client-side codeRavie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]