‘Tone deaf’ CrowdStrike to cut jobs and use AI after IT outage, UK retailers face 10% rise in cyber insurance

The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to “AI efficiency”. In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike’s chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business. “We’re operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs,” he said. Guardian 

Bill Gates is speeding up his plans to give away nearly all of his money. “People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” the billionaire wrote on Thursday. The Gates Foundation was originally intended to close twenty years after Mr Gates died, giving away around $200bn (£150bn) in that time. But now the timeline has been brought forward to 2045. “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people,” Mr Gates wrote in a post on his website. Sky News 

UK retailers are likely to face steeper rises for their cyber insurance after damaging attacks on Marks and Spencer, Harrods and the Co-op, adding further pain to a sector that is already seeing premiums rise. Retailers could face 10 per cent rate increases following the recent hacking incidents, said Dan Leahy, head of cyber at broker BMS. “We expect this will drive underwriters to increase scrutiny on cyber security controls, raise rates and, for some insurers, reconsider whether to write cyber insurance for retail business,” Leahy said. FT.com

About 1.2m people in the UK were affected by banking outages that happened on what was pay day for many earlier this year. The details have emerged in letters, external from Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC to Dame Meg Hillier, the chair of the Commons Treasury Committee, which is looking into the incident that occurred on Friday, 28 February. HSBC also revealed that customers had to wait two hours on average that day to reach its online customer service team. Its standard target wait time is five minutes. BBC 

When Apple releases the next iPhone operating software, iOS 18.5 (and it’s imminent: read this for exactly when it will land), it will have a feature nobody was expecting: satellite connectivity for the iPhone 13 series. This is something previously restricted to iPhone 14 series phones and later. In the next few days, Apple will add a highly useful (and potentially life-saving) feature. The software update that makes this possible is free though the carrier may or may not charge for the service. Forbes 

The next installment in the Grand Theft Auto franchise might be pushed until 2026, but gamers are eating up every morsel of detail that developer Rockstar Games is releasing to the public. Case in point: Rockstar released the second trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI on Tuesday, and the company tells The Hollywood Reporter that it has received over 475 million views across platforms. Hollywood Reporter