If you’re a Verizon customer who’s noticed your phone shifting into SOS mode throughout the day, there’s now an official explanation: As confirmed by Verizon itself, the carrier has been facing a nationwide outage throughout the afternoon.

“We are aware of an issue impacting wireless voice and data services for some customers,” Verizon said to Lifehacker sister site Mashable. “Our engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly. We understand how important reliable connectivity is and apologize for the inconvenience.”

The company also posted an acknowledgement over on X, while on popular service interruption tracking website Downdetector (which is owned by the same parent company as Lifehacker), user reports of problems have been coming in steadily since about noon. They reached a peak of over 170,000 reports at around 12:50 EST, and while they’ve dropped steadily since then, the latest update at time of writing still saw over 60,000 reports of problems.

I’m a Verizon customer, but my phone seems to be unaffected for now, even if I turn my wifi off and rely purely on my cell signal. That’s a bit surprising, as according to Downdetector, the areas with the most reports include both New York City (likely meaning Manhattan) and Brooklyn, which would include where I’m located. Other areas reporting major disruptions include Charlotte, N.C.; Houston; Atlanta; Dallas; Philadelphia; Miami; and Ashburn, Va.

As for which services are impacted, 61% of reports only point out mobile phone problems in general, but 35% of reports specifically complain about a lack of signal, while 4% report issues with mobile internet.

You’ll know if you’re affected if your signal strength is low, which is usually indicated by four vertical bars in the top-right corner of your phone. Your phone might also display that it’s in “SOS” Mode. This does not mean that you or your phone are in any danger, but rather, that signal is only present for contacting emergency services like 911.

Unfortunately, the best you can do while the outage is resolved is probably wait, although if you’re connected to wifi and are still having issues calling or texting, you could try an alternative messaging app like WhatsApp, as well as ensure that wifi calling is enabled on your phone. The loss of cell service should mostly affect those relying on data from cell towers, rather than those connected to an internet router.

While Verizon is facing the brunt of user reports, T-Mobile and AT&T are also seeing their own share of outage complaints over on Downdetector. Some of these may be a case of confusion, however. On X, T-Mobile said that its network “is operating normally and as expected,” but that some customers may still face issues, specifically if they’re trying to reach someone on a Verizon plan. AT&T posted similar sentiments, albeit with a more aggressive tone.

Meanwhile, city governments are issuing their own warnings. An emergency AlertDC notification sent to Washington D.C. residents said, “If you have an emergency and can not connect using your Verizon Wireless device, please connect using a device from another carrier, a landline, or go to a police district or fire station to report the emergency.”

While the city’s advice is understandable, as it wants to prepare readers for a worst possible scenario, it’s worth reiterating that, for emergency calls, phones can use any viable nearby network. If you are a Verizon customer and you need immediate help from 911, it’s still best to attempt reaching out over the phone (or even text, depending on your area) before taking the extra time to visit emergency services in person. As a reminder, connecting to wifi and enabling wifi calling can help with this.

As for New York, it’s taking a more measured approach with its messaging. New York City’s Office of Emergency Management posted to X that it is aware of the outage and that the government is “working closely with our partners” to asses possible impacts.

Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke has informed employees that the company is preparing for what he calls the “biggest transformation in company history,” a sweeping systems overhaul scheduled to launch on May 3 that will standardize processes across nearly every major division.

The initiative, dubbed One Dell Way, will replace Dell’s existing sprawl of applications, servers and databases with a single enterprise platform designed to unify the 42-year-old company’s operations. Clarke’s memo, sent to staff on Tuesday and obtained by Business Insider, said Dell has spent the past two years building toward this transition.

The May 3 launch will affect the company’s PC business, finance, supply chain, marketing, sales, revenue operations, services, and HR. The ISG division, which handles cloud and AI infrastructure, will follow in August. “We need one way — simplified, standardized and automated — so we can be more competitive and serve our customers better,” Clarke wrote. Mandatory training begins February 3.

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The US House of Representatives, that glorious and efficient gathering of We the People, has been hit with yet another scandal.

Like most (non-sexual) House scandals, the allegations here involve personal enrichment. Unlike most (non-sexual) House scandals, though, this one involved hundreds of government cell phones being sold on eBay—and some rando member of We the People calling the US House IT help desk, which blew the lid on the whole scheme.

Only sell “in parts”

According to the government’s version of events, 43-year-old Christopher Southerland was working in 2023 as a sysadmin for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In his role, Southerland had the authority to order cell phones for committee staffers, of which there are around 80.

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After weeks of sexualized images of women and children being generated with Grok with very limited interventions from Elon Musk’s xAI, California Attorney General Rob Bonta plans to investigate whether Grok’s outputs break any US laws.

In a press release Wednesday, Bonta said that “xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the Internet, including via the social media platform X.”

Notably, Bonta appears to be as concerned about Grok’s standalone app and website being used to generate harmful images without consent as he is about the outputs on X.

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The App Store is a home for many kinds of apps (including, inexplicably, one that lets users undress strangers without their consent). But hey, it also has games! And soon the store’s Apple Arcade service will include one more: the not-so-highly rated Civilization VII.

Apple announced on Wednesday that Sid Meier’s Civilization VII will arrive almost exactly a year after launch. The game is already available for Apple devices, but its arrival on Apple Arcade will be a first.

Firaxis Games / Apple

“Free (for Apple Arcade subscribers)” may be the right pricing for the game, given its mixed reviews. A common complaint is the way it handles transitions between eras. (“I have Ben Franklin leading the Romans that turned into Ben Franklin leading Spain… like what? Who asked for this?” a Steam reviewer wrote.) On the other hand, its visuals are praised by most.

The Apple Arcade edition of Civilization VII is scheduled to arrive on February 5. It will be playable on Mac, iPhone and iPad.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/civilization-vii-comes-to-apple-arcade-in-february-203000754.html?src=rss

California authorities have launched an investigation into xAI following weeks of reports that the chatbot was generating sexualized images of children. “xAI appears to be facilitating the large-scale production of deepfake nonconsensual intimate images that are being used to harass women and girls across the internet, including via the social media platform X,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said in a statement. 

The statement cited a report that “more than half of the 20,000 images generated by xAI between Christmas and New Years depicted people in minimal clothing,” including some that appeared to be children. “We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material,” Bonta said. “Today, my office formally announces an investigation into xAI to determine whether and how xAI violated the law.

The investigation was announced as California Governor Gavin Newsom also called on Bonta to investigate xAI. “xAI’s decision to create and host a breeding ground for predators to spread nonconsensual sexually explicit AI deepfakes, including images that digitally undress children, is vile,” Newsom wrote.

California authorities aren’t the first to investigate the company following widespread reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate images of women. UK regulator Ofcom has also opened an official inquiry, and European Union officials have said they are also looking into  the issue. Malaysia and Indonesia have moved to block Grok. 

Last week, xAI began imposing rate limits on Grok’s image generation abilities, but has so far declined to pull the plug entirely. When asked to comment on the California investigation, xAI responded with an automated email that said “Legacy Media Lies.” 

Earlier on Wednesday, Elon Musk said he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.” Notably, that statement does not directly refute Bonta’s allegation that Grok is being used “to alter images of children to depict them in minimal clothing and sexual situations.” Musk said that “the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws” and that the company works to address cases of “adversarial hacking of Grok prompts.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/california-is-investigating-grok-over-ai-generated-csam-and-nonconsensual-deepfakes-202029635.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shares a report: Global temperatures soared in 2025, but a NASA statement published Wednesday alongside its latest benchmark annual report makes no reference to climate change, in line with President Donald Trump’s push to deny the reality of planetary heating as a result of human activities.

That marks a sharp break from last year’s communications, issued under the administration of Democrat Joe Biden, which stated plainly: “This global warming has been caused by human activities” and has led to intensifying “heat waves, wildfires, intense rainfall and coastal flooding.”

Last year’s materials also featured lengthy quotes from the then-NASA chief and a senior scientist and included graphics and a video. By contrast, this year’s release only runs through a few key figures, and amounts to a handful of paragraphs. According to the US space agency, Earth’s global surface temperature in 2025 was slightly warmer than in 2023 — albeit within a margin of error — making it effectively tied as the second-hottest year on record after 2024.

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The prices that Americans paid for subscription- and rental-based access to video streaming services and video games increased 29 percent from December 2024 to December 2025, according to data that the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released on Tuesday.

According to the BLS, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), which BLS says represents over 90 percent of the US population across the country, for all items “increased 2.7 percent before seasonal adjustment.”

The CPI-U for “subscription and rental of video and video games” includes subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) streaming services, like Netflix and Disney+, and “one-time rental of video and video game media. These may be rented or subscribed to through physical copy, streaming, or temporary download,” BLS says. For comparison, “cable, satellite, and live streaming television service [such as YouTube TV and Sling]” saw 4.9 percent inflation last year.

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It’s not whoever gets to the flagpole first, but who does it with the most style. Following PlayStation and Steam, Nintendo has finally released an annual recap so you can pour over your Switch and Switch 2 stats for 2025, and as it turns out, even see your playtime data for as far back as when you first booted up a Nintendo Switch system.

Mid-January is a bit of a late release for one of these annual recaps, and last year’s Nintendo Switch Year in Review came out in mid-December. However, since Metroid Prime 4 came out pretty shortly before that, I can see why Nintendo might have opted to wait this year. Plus, the delay gave people who got Nintendo Switch 2 systems for the holidays some time to get some stats on the book before year’s end.

Like last year, Nintendo’s 2025 recap is available via browsers rather than a dedicated app. Just head to the recap webpage, sign into your Nintendo Account, and scroll to see all your stats.

If you started playing on a Nintendo Switch 2 system this year, you’ll first see some congratulations for that, and then the real fun can begin. I’ll post some examples from my Year in Review below, but be nice—I play most of my games on PC, and when I do play on Switch, it’s mostly on my husband’s profile. I swear I do more in my free time than just browse YouTube Shorts until I fall asleep, honest.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

Anyway, you’ll start off looking at how many games and hours you played in total, and then get a short list of the games you played the most. After that, you’ll get breakdowns by genre and month, and then comes the coolest part of this whole thing. You’ll be able to pick your own personal game of the year from the games you’ve played, which will show up on a card you can share with others.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

In a bit of a different twist, though, Nintendo’s data doesn’t end at 2025. Instead, if you keep scrolling, you’ll see when you first started playing on a Nintendo Switch system, as well as your most played games for each of the years you’ve been playing Switch. Mouse over a game to see stats for it, or click the “See Your Stats” button in the lower-right corner to see detailed stats for that year, with a breakdown of your most played games, favorite genres that year, and playtime broken down by month.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

At the end, you’ll get a short shareable video with a bite-sized look at your entire Switch history, showing when you first started playing a Switch and/or Switch 2, which games you’ve played the most, and how long you’ve played each.

In that way, Nintendo’s Year in Review is almost more of a Console in Review, but I suppose that makes sense—the original Switch hasn’t been discontinued yet, but the Switch 2 did come out last year.

At any rate, it’s always fun to see these recaps come to more than just music. And Nintendo still managed to beat Xbox to a 2025 recap, as Microsoft is reportedly skipping one of those, based on sources who spoke to Windows Central.

Verizon said on Wednesday that its wireless service was suffering an outage impacting cellular data and voice services. From a report: The nation’s largest wireless carrier said that its “engineers are engaged and are working to identify and solve the issue quickly.” Verizon’s statement came after a swath of social media comments directed at Verizon, with users saying that their mobile devices were showing no bars of service or “SOS,” indicating a lack of connection.

Verizon, which has more than 146 million customers, appears to have started experiencing services issues around 12:00 p.m. ET, according to comments on social media site X. Users also reported problems with Verizon competitor T-Mobile. But the company said that it was not having any service issues. “T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating optimally,” a spokesperson told NBC News. “However, due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.”

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