Netflix Spent Six Years Telling Customers Love Is Sharing a Password. Once It Started Charging $7.99 a Month Per Shared Password Instead, Subscriber Growth Hit Its Best Year Since the Pandemic.
On March 10, 2017, Netflix's official Twitter account posted four words that would follow the company around for the next six years: "Love is sharing a password." It was a promo tweet for a show called Love, but it was also, unmistakably, a policy statement — an
A Hand-Tightened Blind Flange and a Botched Shift Handover Killed 167 Men on Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha Platform in 22 Minutes. No One at the Company Was Ever Criminally Charged.
At around 10 p.m. on July 6, 1988, a pressure safety valve that had been pulled for maintenance that morning let gas condensate leak past a blind flange that had only been hand-tightened. Within 22 minutes, the Piper Alpha platform, 120 miles northeast of Aberdeen in the North
New York Paused Congestion Pricing for 'Affordability' Weeks Before a 2024 Election, Then Relaunched It at a Lower Price Once Voting Was Over. A Year Later, Traffic Was Down 11 Percent and the Federal Government Was Still in Court Trying to Kill It.
On June 5, 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul stood before reporters and "indefinitely paused" New York's Central Business District Tolling Program, the long-planned congestion charge for driving into Manhattan below 60th Street. The launch was three weeks away. Hochul cited affordability concerns for working- and middle-
Twitter Cut Off the Third-Party Apps That Built Its Developer Ecosystem in January 2023 With No Warning. One of Those Apps Coined the Word Tweet and Designed Twitter's Bird Logo Before Twitter Had Either.
On January 13, 2023, Twitter's API went dark for third-party client apps with no announcement and no explanation. Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix, and others simply stopped working, all at once, for everyone. Developers spent days guessing whether it was a bug, an outage, or deliberate. Four days later,
Meta's Georgia Data Center Draws Roughly Ten Percent of the County's Daily Water Supply to Cool Servers. A Member of Congress Had to Bring Jars of the Neighbors' Brown Tap Water to a Hearing Before the EPA Agreed to Look.
Beverly and Jeff Morris live about 1,000 feet from Meta's data center campus straddling Newton and Morgan Counties, Georgia, a $750 million-to-$1 billion-plus build in the Stanton Springs industrial park. Their well water ran dry, then came back brown with sediment, and in the
A Power Bank Stored in an Overhead Bin Destroyed an Air Busan Jet in January 2025. Airlines Across Asia Responded by Requiring Passengers Keep Their Power Banks Closer to Their Bodies, Not Farther Away.
On the night of 28 January 2025, an Air Busan Airbus A321 with 176 people aboard was preparing to taxi at Gimhae International Airport in Busan, South Korea, when a fire broke out in the rear cabin. Everyone evacuated down the slides; seven people came away with minor smoke-inhalation
New York City's Local Law 18 All But Eliminated Short-Term Rentals to Protect the Housing Stock. Manhattan Hotel Rooms Now Average $444 a Night, and the Hotel Industry That Lobbied for the Law Calls Itself Fully Supportive.
New York City's Local Law 18 took effect on September 5, 2023, requiring anyone renting out a room or apartment for under 30 days to register with the Mayor's Office of Special Enforcement, pay a non-refundable $145 fee, and be physically present for the entire
Exxon's In-House Climate Models From 1977 Onward Predicted Global Warming More Accurately Than NASA's Did. The Company Spent the Next Three Decades Paying Other People to Say the Models Were Wrong.
In July 1977, an Exxon scientist named James Black stood before the company's Management Committee and told them there was "general scientific agreement" that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet. The following year he put a number on it in a memo to a vice
Samsung Moved Up the Galaxy Note 7's Launch to Beat a Phone Reviewers Called Boring. The Boring Phone Was Still Legal to Bring on an Airplane.
On August 19, 2016, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 ahead of its usual schedule. According to Bloomberg's reporting at the time, the move was deliberate: get to market before Apple's iPhone 7, a phone the tech press had already pegged as an incremental, unexciting refresh
Facebook Had Two Burmese-Speaking Content Moderators in 2015. Myanmar's Military Had a 700-Person Unit Running Fake Accounts on the Same Platform.
In 2014, Facebook's Burmese-language content review team consisted of one person. In early 2015 the company hired a second, bringing the worldwide moderation staff for a country of roughly 50 million people to two. Facebook did not have a single employee physically based in Myanmar at all.
In 1954, the Cigarette Industry Ran a Full-Page Ad Promising Honest Research Into Smoking and Cancer. One of Its Own Chemists Had Already Confirmed the Link a Year Earlier.
On January 4, 1954, the seven largest cigarette manufacturers in America bought a full page in more than 400 newspapers, reaching an estimated 43 million readers in 258 cities. The ad was called "A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers," and its message was simple: recent research linking cigarettes
Merck Pulled Vioxx From the Market in 2004 After Linking It to Tens of Thousands of Heart Attacks. The FDA Didn't Formally Revoke Its Approval Until 2022.
On May 20, 1999, the FDA approved Merck's application to sell rofecoxib under the brand name Vioxx, an arthritis and pain pill from the new COX-2 inhibitor class. Merck's own 1999 annual report put it on the cover: Vioxx was "the biggest, fastest, and
A Swiss Court Convicted Credit Suisse of Laundering Cocaine Money in June 2022, the First Criminal Conviction of a Major Bank in the Country's History. Nine Months Later, the Bank No Longer Existed.
On the weekend of March 18–19, 2023, the president of the Swiss Confederation, the head of the Swiss National Bank, and the chief executives of the country's two largest banks worked through two nights to close a deal before Asian markets opened Monday morning. The government invoked