Google has terminated the employment of workers, Tesla has disbanded its Supercharger team, and UnitedHealthcare has disclosed security breaches.
Welcome, everyone, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly newsletter summarizing the past week in the tech world. This edition is a bit bittersweet for me — it will be my last (at least for now). I’ll soon be focusing on a new newsletter dedicated to AI, which I’m really excited about. Stay tuned!
Moving on to the news: This week, Google made staff reductions within its Flutter, Dart, and Python teams just weeks ahead of its annual I/O developer conference. Around 200 employees were affected across Google’s “Core” teams, which included individuals working on app platforms and various engineering roles.
In other developments, Tesla CEO Elon Musk downsized the company’s team responsible for managing its Supercharger network in a recent round of layoffs — despite having recently secured deals with major automakers like Ford and General Motors. The layoffs were extensive enough that Musk indicated in an email that they would necessitate slowing down the expansion of the Supercharger network.
UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Andrew Witty, informed a House subcommittee that the ransomware group responsible for breaching U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare — a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare — utilized stolen credentials to access Change Healthcare systems lacking multifactor authentication. Last week, UnitedHealthcare disclosed that the hackers obtained health data belonging to a “significant portion of the American population.”
A lot more occurred this week. We cover everything in this edition of WiR — but before diving in, don’t forget to subscribe to receive the WiR newsletter directly in your inbox every Saturday.
