Facebook-owner Meta Platforms has cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday, as he warned them to brace for a deep economic downturn.

US regulators have approved a record US$5 billion fine on Facebook to settle an investigation into data privacy violations, reports in US media say.

Organisers say volunteers are running hundreds of Telegram groups that are powering Hong Kong's protest turned civil disobedience campaign. They claim that more than two million people have taken to the streets in recent weeks to express opposition to a controversial extradition law.

Computer scientists are contemplating their own "A-Bomb moment." Facebook's carelessness with user data, and attacks the company has enabled against western democracies, are on software engineers' consciences.

Yahoo has kicked off an auction for a portfolio of about 3,000 patents expected to fetch more than US$1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Facebook was working on a "beautiful" and "groundbreaking" phone designed by Yves B矇har in 2010, but it didn't yet have the money to make a big bet.

In select countries, users can now sign up for Messenger with a mobile telephone number

Facebook showed the world its first commercial version of virtual reality on Thursday - and offered tantalizing hints of how it hopes to turn three-dimensional goggles into a new kind of computing and communications device.

A Google search for "train" brings up a link to the closest Amtrak station, but chances are that's not what an eight-year-old is searching for. Kids are probably more interested in Thomas the Tank Engine than the most up-to-date commuting schedule.

Social media giant Twitter has said it will open an office in Hong Kong in the first quarter of 2015.

WhatsApp's jaw-dropping US$19 billion price tag took the world by surprise. But Facebook might have actually gotten WhatsApp for cheap.

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will join Facebook's board of directors.

So for Twitter to effectively grow its audience in Asia, it will be crucial to understand and appreciate the differences in user behavior between that region and the US - especially with regards to China.

Hoping to tame the blizzard of information that has turned off many users and discouraged some advertisers, Facebook on Thursday unveiled a major makeover of the home page that greets users when they log into the site.

Microsoft's instant messaging and video chat are set for a major shake-up, with Microsoft announcing today that the Windows Live Messenger brand and client will be retired in the first quarter of 2013. They'll be replaced by the Skype client and Skype name everywhere, except for China, which will retain the Messenger naming.

Facebook was expected to be the poster child of success when it went public two weeks ago but since its May 18 debut, shares have slid 33% from the initial public offering price of US$38.

"In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared," said Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital while appearing on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

Facebook has announced plans to acquire Instagram, a photo-sharing app for mobile devices, for approximately US$1 billion.

Facebook has added a trove of IBM patents to its arsenal on an increasingly lawsuit-strewn technology battlefield.

Google's head of social had some sharp words for Facebook while speaking Wednesday at a tech conference, where Google co-founder Sergey Brin also showed up as a surprise guest.

The completion of the acquisition also marks the official introduction of Skype as a new business division within Microsoft.

"They've got to sell the company, break it up, do something..."

Google's Facebook competitor Google+ grew to 10 million users in just two weeks, the company announced Thursday.

"This means our content is getting stronger, while our supervision is getting more strict and more regulated," a state-run think tank said.

Hackers apparently broke into the FoxNews.com's Twitter feed for political news early Monday and used it to announce - falsely - that President Barack Obama had been assassinated.

Facebook has told investors in a US$2 billion fundraising that its stock-exchange listing could come as early as April 2012, setting the stage for one of the most highly anticipated initial public offerings in recent years.

Did TIME cave in to political pressure? I neither know nor care. What I do know is that this year's choice is simply ludicrous.

Half a billion people around the world are now using Facebook on a monthly basis. That means Facebook has a slightly smaller population than the continent of North America. The social network also has enough users to put 75 people on every one of the over 6.6 million square miles of Russia, the largest country in the world by landmass.

No Tech Day is a time to set aside the luxury gadgets for 24 hours "to raise awareness of how much we all rely on and use gadgets in our everyday life, and think what life is like for people in the developing world who do not have the same access to technology and energy."

China's Alibaba is in talks with one of its investors, Japan's Softbank, to form a tie-up to help merchants from their online marketplaces sell into each others' markets, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Popular social-networking site Facebook will open an office in India, joining a long list of international firms that have looked to tap a skilled workforce that provides support services at relatively cheap wages.

Red Cross donations made by texting reach US$5 million, as the campaign to raise money for Haiti relief efforts goes viral in an always-connected society.

Internet giant Google has made a shock threat to quit China, the world's biggest Internet market by users, after hackers accessed human rights activists' e-mail accounts.

The American Dialect Society, an association that studies the English language, has announced that "tweet" is the top word of 2009, and "Google" - the verb, not the noun - is the top word of the past decade.

The World Trade Organization has ruled that China's practice of funneling media imports to state-owned companies violates international trade laws. The ruling was a result of complaints filed by a number of US media companies, which contend that China's practices illegally restrict business opportunities.

Wikipedia.org is the fifth-most-popular Web site in the world, with roughly 325 million monthly visitors. But unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.

Cloud computing and flash-based storage, two fast-emerging IT technologies, are driving each other forward as users of Internet-based services like social networks demand near-real-time access to ever-growing amounts of data.

The power of technology - such as blogs - meant that the world could no longer be run by "elites", Mr Brown said.

Bargaining is much more than a team sport in China -- it's also a way of life that has been ingrained in the psyche of Chinese society for centuries.