21 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Archives for April 2026

Tom Warren
Tom Warren
GitHub just had a major outage.

GitHub uses a queue for developers when lots of people are working on a single project. It’s designed to avoid changes clashing and developers breaking things, but yesterday it failed in a catastrophic way thanks to a bug that randomly reverted previously merged commits (code snapshots). GitHub also had other outages yesterday, on the same day I reported on employee concerns about GitHub reliability and leadership.

Dominic Preston
Dominic Preston
Trump is mad about the UK’s digital tax again.

He threatened to “put a big tariff on the UK” if it doesn’t drop its tax on the revenue of tech giants, despite the Supreme Court ruling that he can’t actually do that. The president still thinks the tax, which brought in £944m ($1.3bn) last year, unfairly targets US companies.

Saros is pure action nirvana

Returnal developer Housemarque is back with a PS5 exclusive that delivers a euphoric, trance-inducing experience.

Lewis Gordon
Tom Warren
Tom Warren
This is Microsoft’s new Xbox logo.

Microsoft has scrapped Microsoft Gaming in favor of Xbox today, and it’s also starting to roll out a new Xbox logo. The new logo started appearing on Microsoft’s campus this week, just in time for Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s all-hands meeting earlier today. The new Xbox logo has a more glassy look, and I understand Microsoft has also been using this new design for some of its internal Project Helix materials.

Image: Microsoft
Terrence O'Brien
Terrence O'Brien
NASA made its LAVA physics modeling software available to anyone.

Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) is the tool NASA uses to model reentry, aerodynamics, and fluid dynamics for Mars landers and the SLS (Space Launch System) that launched Artemis II. And now it’s available for researchers and commercial aerospace companies, even those without a supercomputer:

Aerospace engineers rely on “scale-resolving simulations” to capture high-fidelity renderings of phenomena that can have profound effects on missions, including pressure waves, turbulent swirls, and acoustic signatures. Those were once resource- and time-consuming. Now, LAVA runs them on modest computing resources, making them readily available and easy to produce, even for novice users.

Stevie Bonifield
Stevie Bonifield
DirecTV is streaming TV directly into Meta Quest headsets.

DirecTV now supports mixed reality with its new app for the Quest 2, 3, 3S, and even Pro headsets. There’s live TV for subscribers, plus on-demand and ad-supported content anyone can watch, available in the app store or through the Horizon TV hub Meta launched last year.

A person watching The Pitt on DirecTV with a Meta Quest headset
Image: DirecTV