TSMC’s evacuated workers return to some factories after Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in 25 years

Published

2 years ago

April 3, 2024

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An aerial view shows workers taking down a collapsed building in eastern Taiwan’s Hualien county following an earthquake/

Sam Yeh | Afp | Getty Images

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said all its workers were safe and those who were evacuated have started returning to some factory lines after a major earthquake hit Taiwan early Wednesday.

The island was rocked by a massive earthquake that collapsed buildings and prompted tsunami advisories from Japan and the Philippines. Officials said at least four people have died.

A TSMC spokesperson said construction sites were normal upon initial inspection, but the company decided to suspend work at the sites for the day. The person said work will resume after further inspections and that TSMC is still evaluating details of the earthquake’s impact.

Earlier, the chipmaker said it evacuated some personnel from some fabs in accordance with company safety protocols.

Shares of TSMC fell 1%. The broader Taiwan Weighted Index was down 0.9%. TSMC is the biggest company on the index, with a market cap of $639.65 billion.

Taiwan Stock Exchange Corporation said in a statement that it checked its computers and network systems following the earthquake and confirmed they all are operating normally.

The earthquake registered a magnitude of 7.4 in Hualien County, the island’s biggest quake since 1999, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Tremors were felt in the capital city of Taipei.

The Japan Meteorological Agency issued tsunami advisories for some of the country’s southern islands and regions, but later removed those designations. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology also raised a tsunami warning in the country following the Taiwan quake.

Flights schedules were disrupted in Japan, with some Japan Airlines flights canceled following the earthquake in Taiwan. Shares of Japan Airlines were up 0.7%.

Another Japanese carrier, ANA Holdings, temporarily suspended flights from Okinawa Naha, Miyako, and Ishigaki Airports earlier in the day. The company has now resumed operations but said some flights have been delayed or canceled. Shares of the company were flat.

— CNBC’s Penny Chen contributed to this story.

Technology

ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Published

5 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Beta stock jumps 9% on billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Published

7 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software