YouTube, the second most visited website in the world, had experienced an outage across its various platforms on Tuesday night for more than an hour. The Google-owned streaming site took to Twitter to thank users for your reports about YouTube, YouTube TV and YouTube Music access issues.
Google is shutting down much of its social network, Google+, after user data was left exposed. It said a bug in its software meant information that people believed was private had been accessible by third parties. Google said up to 500,000 users had been affected.
Apple has paid the Irish government €14.3bn (£12.7bn), money that the European Commission ruled the tech giant owed due to illegal tax breaks. Ireland's Finance ministry said the payment was a significant milestone, although Dublin insists Apple was not given any special tax treatment. In 2016 the Commission ruled the below 1% effective tax rate the firm paid in Ireland amounted to illegal state aid.
A windfall tax could be levied on tech giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook to pay for public interest journalism, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to announce. The Labour leader will call for radical reform of the media landscape in a speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
Hundreds of Google employees have written to the company to protest against plans to launch a censored search engine in China. They said the project raised urgent moral and ethical questions and urged the firm to be more transparent.
Google has been fined 2.42bn Euros by the European Commission after it ruled the company had abused its power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of search results. The amount is the regulator's largest penalty to date against a company accused of distorting the market.
Google has confirmed that private emails sent and received by Gmail users can sometimes be read by third-party app developers, not just machines. People who have connected third-party apps to their accounts may have unwittingly given human staff permission to read their messages.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft push users away from privacy-friendly options on their services in an unethical way, according to a report by the Norwegian Consumer Council. It studied the privacy settings of the firms and found a series of dark patterns, including intrusive default settings and misleading wording.
Google has said it will invest US$300 million in helping news organizations to fight fake news and grow their businesses. The search engine giant will also invest in new technological tools to enhance online news consumption.
Hungarian born billionaire investor George Soros has criticised tech “monopolies” such as Facebook and Google, calling them a threat to democracy. At his annual dinner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Soros warned that social media platforms were “obstacles to innovation”.