Today’s Cache | Google layoff, Twitter outage, and code-generating AI

Search engine giant Google’s plans for a new and tougher employee performance review that will make

Search engine giant Google’s plans for a new and tougher employee performance review that will make it harder to succeed but easier to fail has sparked fears of an upcoming layoff. While companies like Meta, Facebook, and Intel fired hundreds in the past months, Google has slowed down hiring. During a team meeting, CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told employees that he could not make “forward looking commitments.” Several Googlers in Europe have written a letter expressing worries that more negative rankings under the new performance review process will make it easier for the company to slash its headcount.

Twitter on Wednesday experienced an outage that led to thousands of complaints on the outage detecting platform Downdetector. At its height, over 10,000 U.S.-based users said they were affected, while about 2,500 each from Japan and the UK reported issues. People struggled to log into Twitter via their desktops while mobile users flagged issues with their notifications. CEO Elon Musk said, however, that the app was working fine for him.

A study by Stanford-affiliated researchers has found that programmers who use AI-based tools to write code or get help with their codes run the risk of introducing more security vulnerabilities when compared to a control group which wrote its own code. The study looked at the tool Codex by San Francisco-based OpenAI and used 47 developers to test its theory. Those who used AI-based tools to generate code were also more likely to believe that their vulnerable code was secure, compared to the developers who did not use AI.