Among the automaker's investments is a controversial proposed lithium mine in Nevada.

Ford is making major investments in its battery supply chain.

In a sign that the electric vehicle race is heating up, Ford announced that it's expanding its battery supply chain. One of its new deals includes an investment in the controversial Rhyolite Ridge mine in Nevada.

The U.S. automaker said on Thursday that it will have enough battery supplies to bring 600,000 EVs to market per year by the end of 2023. That would get the company on the way toward meeting its goal of building 2 million EVs annually by late 2026.

The company said it has reached a major agreement with the Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited, which is the world’s largest battery-pack supplier. Ford will also buy from LG Energy Solutions and up its buy from its existing partner SK On.

The company also signed a binding off-take agreement to purchase lithium from the Rhyolite Ridge mine, a proposed open pit lithium mine in Nevada. The project is controversial because it could potentially destroy a rare buckwheat plant that Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The project reflects growing tensions between conservation and local environmental damage caused by mining critical minerals versus the climate crisis and need for electrifying everything ASAP. Ford has not commented publicly on why it chose to source lithium from this project or if it plans to seek out critical minerals from other controversial locations.

The expansion of Ford’s battery sources also involves diversifying the types of batteries it uses. The company said it would expand the use of lithium iron phosphate battery cells in addition to the nickel cobalt manganese cells it currently relies on. These LFP batteries could provide a lower-cost option for Ford’s growing EV fleet.

Ford’s announcement is an example of just how dramatically automakers’ priorities have shifted. The company's electrified versions of the Mustang and F-150 have proven popular; Ford has already sold 17,675 Mustang Mach Es and 2,296 F-150 Lightnings and demand shows no sign of slowing down given high gas prices. The ambitious EV plans of Ford and many of the industry’s giants means a stable battery supply chain is a major competitive advantage.

This comes as the federal government also makes investments in the domestic battery supply chain in a bid to avoid reliance on China as the U.S. transitions to EVs.

In all the talk of Ford’s push to secure its electric future, the company did not mention a recent report from Bloomberg that the company is anticipating layoffs, to the tune of up to 8,000 employees. Many of those layoffs are expected in the recently created Ford Blue unit tasked with keeping its legacy internal combustion business going.

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Lisa Martine Jenkins is a senior reporter at Protocol covering climate. Lisa previously wrote for Morning Consult, Chemical Watch and the Associated Press. Lisa is currently based in Brooklyn, and is originally from the Bay Area. Find her on Twitter ( @l_m_j_) or reach out via email (ljenkins@protocol.com).

The ad market is starting to get very rocky: Roku warned investors about a “significant slowdown in TV advertising spend” as it reported its second-quarter earnings Thursday.

Citing a recent advertiser perception study, Roku CFO Steve Louden told reporters during a media call Thursday afternoon that almost half of all advertisers had paused some ad spending during the second quarter. “It was a challenging quarter for Roku and for a lot of others,” Louden said.

"We are in an economic environment defined by recessionary fears, inflationary pressures, rising interest rates, and ongoing supply chain disruptions," the company wrote in its letter to investors, which also likened this moment to uncertainties during the early months of COVID. “We believe this pullback mirrors the start of the pandemic in 2020, when marketers prepared for macro uncertainties by quickly reducing ad spend across all platforms.”

“The quickest and easiest way [for companies to slow spending] is to pull back on marketing temporarily,” said Louden. However, he admitted that the company was nonetheless taken by surprise. “The severity of the pullback … was not expected,” he said.

As a result of these challenges, Roku execs said that they had begun to slow down hiring and content spending. Roku hasn’t instituted a hiring freeze, according to Louden, and also didn’t have any layoffs in Q2. However, he said that the company had begun to adjust spending on original content for the Roku Channel.

Roku’s Q2 revenue was $764.4 million, with net losses of $112 million. The company added 1.8 million new accounts during the quarter, but streaming hours declined by 200 million quarter over quarter. Roku forecast a loss of $190 million for Q3, and withdrew its full-year guidance. Roku's share price, which had already fallen by nearly two-thirds since the beginning of the year, was down another 25% in after-hours trading.

Intel issued a grim quarterly report card Thursday, telling investors that the company’s ever-important data center and AI business revenue declined 16% to $4.6 billion.

Intel said that the poor results were mostly due to a weakened economy, supply chain and inventory disruption and “competitive pressures.”

“This quarter’s results were below the standards we have set for the company and our shareholders,” CEO Pat Gelsinger said in a statement. “We must and will do better.”

The company’s third-quarter outlook didn’t offer much relief: Intel said it now expects per-share profit of 12 cents on revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion. Its stock was down 8% in after-hours trading.

Overall, Intel reported a second-quarter net loss of $500 million on revenue of $15.3 billion; revenue dropped 22% compared with the second quarter of last year. The company’s gross margin dropped nearly 21 percentage points to 37% — typical industry margins run at 50% or above, as Intel’s had for years. Both revenue and losses missed Intel’s own forecast and Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, according to data from Sentieo.

In a conference call late Thursday, Intel executives said the company’s data center business suffered because it had difficulties assembling “match sets” or the complete group of components necessary to ship a finished product to a customer. Growing macro-economic concerns are hurting demand in the second half of the year, and Gelsinger said the company had lowered expectations accordingly.

Executives also confirmed that Intel wasn’t planning to manufacture its Sapphire Rapids server chips at high volume until next year — roughly half a year from its prior guidance — despite making some version of the chip already.

“[It’s] later than we expected, Sapphire Rapids,” CFO David Zinsner said. “It’s ramping later. We have some SKUs out, which is good, but the main SKUs are not out and they happen later in the year. And of course, they’ll contribute way more significantly to next year than they’re going to contribute to this year.”

The company’s PC segment revenue — which has been Intel’s largest for years — declined 25% to $7.7 billion, hurt by the slowdown in demand for consumer electronics. The fledging contract manufacturing revenue declined by more than half to $122 million.

Mobileye, the company’s self-driving unit, was a bright spot, and it reported a 41% jump in revenue to $460 million.

This story was updated with additional information from Intel's earnings conference call.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the gross margin percentage point drop. This story was updated on July 28, 2022.

What a difference two weeks and a name change makes: Sen. Joe Manchin left the Build Back Better Act for dead (twice). But late Wednesday, the West Virginia senator and Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said they reached an agreement to spend $369 billion to turn the climate tide. It's nowhere near enough funding to save the planet, but it will help get clean energy tech deployed more rapidly and inch the U.S. closer to meeting President Joe Biden's climate goals.

The new legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, contains $369 billion in climate and clean energy funding — proving a name change can go a long way toward getting what you want. That dollar amount is less than what was on the table in various iterations of the Build Back Better Act, but it does spread the money that is there around to multiple facets of the clean tech industry in ways that Build Back Better never did.

There are tax credits for clean energy and storage deployment at the utility scale. That's a huge boon, given that a recent American Clean Power report found renewable installations plunged 55% in the second quarter compared to the same period last year. A big reason for the dip was Manchin's opposition to Build Back Better, which created regulatory uncertainty.

Having a framework in place for new tax credits, courtesy of the Inflation Reduction Act, could alleviate some concerns and get the industry back on track. Indeed, Heather Zichal, CEO of the trade group, said in a statement the "entire clean energy industry just breathed an enormous sigh of relief" when the new deal was announced.

There are also tax credits for individuals to install solar panels and heat pumps as well as to buy new and used electric vehicles. The bill also gives tax credits to non-EVs that burn cleaner fuel such as hydrogen, but given that Manchin called extending EV tax credits "ludicrous" just a few months ago, this is still a major climate tech win.

Where things get more interesting, though, is the $60 billion the bill sets aside for manufacturing clean tech on U.S. soil from processing minerals to building batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. Oh, and there’s $500 million for heat pumps as part of the Defense Production Act.

“It’s much harder to build an industry through regulations rather than investments,” Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said. “If we really want to build those technologies here in the U.S., we have to invest in those manufacturing industries. That’s a very new thing about this deal.”

That, coupled with $60 billion in funding for environmental justice initiatives that will ensure everyone can enjoy the benefits of cleaner air, save money and more, led Stokes to call the legislation "transformative."

The tech industry could benefit if the bill passes. And not just the clean tech industry, mind you. Tech companies have made some pretty ambitious promises in their climate plans, and the act will make it that much easier to deliver on them. More renewables on the grid will make it easier for companies to power their operations without damaging the climate. More importantly, it will help companies get a handle on Scope 3 emissions — that is, emissions tied to the use of their products.

Scope 3 emissions account for the vast majority of companies' carbon footprints. Microsoft, for example, has a fairly progressive climate plan. But its emissions went up by 21% last year, in part due to people playing games on their Xboxes, watching movies on their Surfaces and so on. That's not a knock on Microsoft necessarily; it's an indication that more than 60% of U.S. electricity comes from fossil fuels. Change the mix to add more renewables, and tech companies could see their Scope 3 emissions drop.

All this comes with caveats, of course. For one, the recently released full text is 725 pages, so it will take a while to digest in full. It will also take a minute for researchers to independently vet whether the promised 40% in emissions reductions is for real or sleight of hand. That 40% emissions reduction is also below Biden's commitment to the Paris Agreement to slash emissions at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. In other words, there's still a lot of work to be done on that front, including the president possibly declaring a climate emergency.

There are also fossil fuel giveaways, notably tying leasing or right-of-ways for renewables on federal lands to fossil fuel leasing as well.

"This all but ensures a growth in carbon emissions and is likely to exacerbate existing political tensions between frontline and energy communities in the Gulf South and wealthier communities along the rest of the American coast,” Billy Fleming, the director of Penn's McHarg Center, said, while noting much of the climate policies were focused on supply-side tweaks rather than reducing demand for fossil fuels.

That means the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is by no means a pure climate bill that's all in on clean tech. But it's better than what was on the table at this time yesterday.

Sens. Dick Durbin and Roger Marshall will propose a bill as early as this week targeting credit card fees, the Wall Street Journal reports. The proposed legislation would be similar to the 2011 Durbin amendment, which capped fees debit card processing companies could charge.

According to the sources who spoke to the Journal, the bill would permit merchants to transact through different networks beyond Visa and Mastercard, a duopoly that controls most of the credit card market. Currently, when a customer uses one of the two companies’ cards, the payment must be processed through the corresponding branded network, which critics say allows the companies to charge high fees without much competition.

In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May, credit card executives said the industry faces increased competition from digital wallets, "buy now, pay later" providers and cryptocurrency. “Regulatory interventions focused exclusively on card networks would shift consumer spending away from networks like Visa, and toward more expensive payment methods with more risk, less reliability and fewer protections and security,” Bill Sheedy, senior adviser to Visa CEO Al Kelly, said at the time.

The bill could have impacts far beyond the pockets of Visa and Mastercard, however. Many fintechs in the business of offering white-labeled credit cards, from corporate spend companies to neobanks, profit from interchange fees. Though the proposed bill targets credit card networks and cards issued by the largest banks, increased competition will likely bring fees down over time, potentially slashing profits.

The new bill would amend the 1978 Electronic Fund Transfer Act, which established consumer rights in electronic payments including charge cards, ACH, ATMs and automatic bank withdrawals. Amendments would need to pass through the Senate Banking Committee, of which neither Sen. Durbin nor Marshall is a member.

Representatives from Visa and Mastercard did not respond immediately to requests for comment, nor did the offices of Sens. Durbin and Marshall.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Roger Marshall's name. This story was updated July 27, 2022.

TikTok announced on Wednesday that it’s working on new transparency tools for researchers. By the end of the year, TikTok says “selected researchers” will have access to APIs that allow them to conduct tests and study trends using anonymized data sets. Though the move will help address mounting concerns in the U.S. over TikTok’s data security, it likely comes in response to the EU's forthcoming Digital Services Act, which contains mandates for research access.

In the blog post, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas acknowledged that researchers currently “do not have easy and accurate ways to identify and assess content and trends or conduct tests of our platform.”

TikTok lags behind competitors in that regard: Both Meta and Twitter offer data sets for researchers. Meta, for instance, launched its Ad Library tool in 2019, responding to allegations of platform misuse surrounding elections. Twitter has likewise shared over 40 data sets that focus on global “platform manipulation campaigns.”

TikTok’s transparency push comes amid mounting scrutiny of its content moderation practices and ties to China. A TikTok spokesperson told Protocol that the company has been working on these changes “for some time as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency and accountability.”

In June, BuzzFeed obtained leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings that suggested ByteDance employees in China could access American user data, despite numerous assurances that data remained siloed between the two nations. It also found that TikTok had been actively working on rerouting data pipelines to address the problem.

The report renewed scrutiny of TikTok by U.S. politicians. In early July, Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio urged Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to launch an immediate investigation into TikTok’s data processing and corporate governance practices, citing the BuzzFeed article.

Previous attempts at investigating TikTok didn’t get far. In 2019, Sens. Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer urged U.S. intelligence agencies to study national security risks posed by TikTok due to the potential for a “foreign influence campaigns like those carried out during the 2016 election.” Former President Donald Trump attempted to force ByteDance to sell the U.S. operations of TikTok to an American company, but that order wasn’t carried out under the Biden administration.

The impetus for TikTok’s new research tools isn’t U.S. pressure, but new EU regulation, according to Gus Rossi, director of platform policy at Omidyar Network.

Article 31 of the forthcoming Digital Services Act requires social media companies to give data to vetted academic researchers for assessing “systemic risks.” Those risks can pertain to illegal activity on the platform or any broader manipulation campaigns.

“It’s hard to imagine that this would be happening if it weren’t because the European Union imposed their mandate,” Rossi told Protocol.

These circumstances raise questions as to just how accessible TikTok’s APIs will be, especially for U.S.-based academics. TikTok only commits to opening access for “selected researchers.” It doesn’t say how those researchers will be selected, nor the scope of data they’ll be able to request.

Update: This story was updated July 27 to include TikTok's statement.

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against Meta and Within, the startup behind the VR fitness app Supernatural. The agency is asking a federal court for a preliminary injunction to stop the two companies from proceeding with an acquisition, alleging the deal would limit competition.

Meta announced its plans to acquire Within in October. The startup's VR fitness app Supernatural has been a surprise hit, and Mark Zuckerberg has called fitness a key part of his company's strategy to broaden the appeal of VR beyond hardcore gaming.

Through a series of key acquisitions and pricing strategies, Meta has turned its VR business into the market's most dominant platform, with a 90% market share in hardware, according to IDC, and subsidiaries behind some of the most successful VR apps, like best-selling rhythm video game Beat Saber. Acquiring yet more software makers could further cement that dominance, critics and regulators have contended.

The FTC alleges this acquisition would be harmful to consumers and competitors alike. “Instead of competing on the merits, Meta is trying to buy its way to the top,” said FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director John Newman in a statement. “Meta chose to buy market position instead of earning it on the merits. This is an illegal acquisition, and we will pursue all appropriate relief.” Meta would be able to close the acquisition of Within by the end of this month if no preliminary injunction is granted, according to the filing.

A Meta spokesperson called those arguments "not credible." "The FTC's case is based on ideology and speculation, not evidence," the spokesperson said in a statement provided to Protocol. "By attacking this deal in a 3-2 vote, the FTC is sending a chilling message to anyone who wishes to innovate in VR. We are confident that our acquisition of Within will be good for people, developers and the VR space.”

The agency further expanded on its position in the complaint itself. "If consummated, the acquisition would substantially lessen competition, or tend to create a monopoly, in the relevant market for VR dedicated fitness apps and the broader relevant market for VR fitness apps," the complaint states. "That lessening of rivalry may yield multiple harmful outcomes, including less innovation, lower quality, higher prices, less incentive to attract and keep employees, and less consumer choice."

The preliminary injunction is meant to give the FTC time to issue an administrative complaint against the merger, and then start full-blown administrative proceedings. Taking that step against a startup acquisition is part of the FTC's more aggressive stance against Big Tech, which includes a focus on emerging technologies.

FTC Chair Lina Khan told Protocol last month that AR and VR were especially important markets for the agency. "I think these types of nascent, expanding markets are definitely on our radar and top of mind," Khan told Protocol. "Especially in as much as VR or AR [are] also becoming a major part of how some of these games are functioning for users and [how] users are interacting."

The U.S. Senate voted 64-33 Wednesday to approve a $280 billion piece of legislation that will dole out a batch of chip manufacturing subsidies and research funding that’s designed to return chip production to the U.S. in some meaningful fashion.

The vote likely marks the end of more than two years of debate, which stalled in recent weeks amid disagreements between the two houses of Congress and within parties. The Senate bill is now set to travel to the House and is expected to pass there, according to several D.C. insiders Protocol spoke with this past week. If or when the House passes the bill, it will head to President Biden, who has signaled he supports this effort to boost U.S. chip manufacturing and plans to sign the bill.

The semiconductor manufacturing-related legislation the Senate passed is a reworked version of the House's bill that strips out some of the components that bogged down passage in favor of ensuring the chip-related funding passes.

Broadly, the Senate version includes roughly $52 billion in subsidies to bolster chip manufacturing in the U.S., spread over five years, and a $24 billion tax credit to support the industry. Beyond the manufacturing subsidies, the bill also adds $200 billion marked for research.

The legislative package is a meaningful sum of money, but for the chip industry, which measures the cost of its future plans in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, $52 billion over five years is “a rounding error given the scale of investments required in this space,” according to Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. The funding and tax breaks will directly benefit chip manufacturers such as Intel, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and TSMC.

Google is buying the Thompson Center, a famed building housing government offices in downtown Chicago, for $105 million. The building will be renovated and redeveloped into a headquarters for Google's employees.

The move comes at a time when most other tech companies are cutting down on office space. Twitter is reducing its office presence in San Francisco, New York and Sydney in an effort to cut costs, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Meta and Amazon are slowing their planned New York office expansions.

Google has more than 2,000 Chicago-based employees and has reportedly been looking to expand its Chicago office presence for months. Its current office is located in the Fulton Market area of Chicago. The company brought employees back to the office in April, requiring workers to come in three days a week. Some employees were unhappy about this policy, claiming it was applied unevenly across Google.

Hulu will now accept ads related to sensitive political issues, after Democrats criticized the Disney-owned platform for rejecting advertising related to abortion access and guns. The decision, first reported by Axios on Wednesday, overturns a policy at Hulu that prohibited ads about controversial content — a policy that has itself become more controversial in light of the Supreme Court's decision undoing Roe v. Wade.

"After a thorough review of ad policies across its linear networks and streaming platforms over the last few months, Disney is now aligning Hulu’s political advertising policies to be consistent with the Company’s general entertainment and sports cable networks and ESPN+,” Disney told Axios. “Hulu will now accept candidate and issue advertisements covering a wide spectrum of policy positions, but reserves the right to request edits or alternative creative, in alignment with industry standards."

Democrats, who had accused the company of "censorship," applauded the decision. "It’s really heartening to see Hulu reverse course on this damaging policy before the midterms," said Stephanie Grasmick, CEO of Rising Tide Interactive, a digital strategy group that works with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "More than ever, digital channels are a primary source of information for voters, so it’s critical that campaigns are free to message on some of the most important issues facing our country, including abortion access and gun violence prevention."

And yet, Hulu's decision to open the floodgates to issue ads raises thorny questions for the platform, including whether it will offer the public any way to see how much political groups and campaigns are actually spending on those ads, whom they're targeting and what they're saying.

Streaming platforms like Hulu are already held to a different standard than traditional broadcasters when it comes to political ads and don't face the same transparency and disclaimer requirements that, say, ABC, NBC and CBS do. That's been a huge source of anxiety for political spending reformers, who have called on the Federal Election Commission to update its transparency requirements for streamers at a time when campaigns are increasingly spending on connected TV ads. In the 2020 race, election-related advertisers spent more than $100 million on connected TV ads.

While it's blocked ads about controversial issues more broadly, Hulu has allowed explicitly political ads in the past and has repeatedly faced criticism for how little accountability there is for the advertisers behind the ads. Now that it's allowing issue ads to run, too, Hulu runs the risk of allowing even more ads to flood the platform, with very little insight into advertisers' targets and spending.

Hulu did not respond to Protocol's questions about whether it has any new transparency features planned and directed Protocol to its public statement.

Hulu also isn't the only company to reverse course on its ad policies ahead of the midterms. Earlier this year, Protocol reported that Spotify would also return to political advertising in 2022, just two years after it decided to prohibit political ads altogether. Spotify said it would only allow ads from candidates, political parties, PACs and elected officials, but it also hadn't created any public-facing tracking system for those ads.

Streaming platforms are now years behind other digital ad giants, including Meta and Google, in terms of providing more transparency into political ads. In the wake of the Russian Internet Research Agency scandal in 2016, both of those companies built political ad archives that offer the public information about who is running an ad, how much they're spending, what they're saying and who they're reaching. Meta even includes issue ads in that archive. Those archives have proved critical for research into elections ads, but they've also created PR crises for the companies — crises that streaming platforms have been able to mostly dodge.

There is, of course, value in Hulu allowing ads that discuss some of the most pressing issues of the moment, including abortion. That's especially true at a time when lawmakers in anti-abortion states are seeking to censor speech about abortion and when getting the word out about abortion access is becoming increasingly tricky online. It's little surprise that Democrats especially would want a change in Hulu's policies.

But allowing ads about abortion necessarily means allowing anti-abortion ads, which may very well contain messaging that abortion rights advocates would consider misinformation. Without any sort of transparency system in place, those ads will now be a lot harder to find.

Update: This story has been updated to include Hulu's response to Protocol.

Kraken is reportedly under investigation for allegedly serving crypto customers in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.

Kraken is suspected of letting users in Iran and other places buy and sell digital assets, violating U.S. sanctions in place since 1979, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has been investigating Kraken since 2019, is expected to impose a fine against the crypto marketplace, the report said.

The Times also said it has reviewed internal messages in which CEO Jesse Powell suggested being open to breaking the law if it would be beneficial to Kraken.

Kraken "does not comment on specific discussions with regulators," Chief Legal Officer Marco Santori said in a statement. He also said the company has "robust compliance measures" and "closely monitors compliance with sanctions laws and, as a general matter, reports to regulators even potential issues."

The reported probe of Kraken overseas transactions highlights the growing concerns that crypto companies have been violating U.S. laws and sanctions against countries like Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Binance, another major crypto marketplace, processed transactions by customers in Iran, violating a U.S. ban.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when Reuters reported on Binance's ban violation. This story was updated on July 26, 2022.

Meta’s VR hardware is getting more expensive. The company announced Tuesday it's raising the prices of its Quest VR headsets by $100. This brings the price of the 128 GB version of the Quest to $399, while the 256 GB version will cost $499.

"In order to continue investing in moving the VR industry forward for the long term, we are adjusting the price of Meta Quest 2 headsets [...] starting on 8/1/22," Meta said on Twitter. The company added that it will include a free copy of its rhythm VR game Beat Saber for a limited time.

Meta is expected to introduce a more expensive headset, code-named Cambria, for enterprise and prosumer use later this year. The company is said to have shipped close to 15 million units of the Quest 2 since its introduction in 2020, according to IDC estimates, and controls roughly 90% of the VR hardware market.

Meta, like many of its competitors in the tech industry, has begun slowing and in some cases freezing hiring for certain departments. Mark Zuckerberg has also reportedly begun bracing his workforce for what the executive has described as an "intense" period of transition for the company during the economic downturn and its recent push to build the metaverse.

The result is an unprecedented pressure to reign in spending and cut costs, especially in Meta's increasingly expensive Reality Labs division. In 2021 alone, the company's AR and VR investments, including selling lower-cost headsets and R&D efforts to develop new products, cost it $10 billion, Meta reported earlier this year.

In June, the company reportedly scrapped plans to release consumer AR glasses as soon as 2024 and will now instead release a demo device to focus on a second iteration down the line. Meta also cancelled a forthcoming smartwatch and decided to reposition its Portal video chat devices as enterprise products for businesses.

The SEC is investigating major cryptocurrency trading firm Coinbase for permitting the trade of unregistered securities, sources told Bloomberg News Monday. The firm has faced increased scrutiny by the agency since expanding the amount of tokens it permits to trade, sources say. The inquiry has not been announced publicly.

The SEC publicly announced that it was charging a former Coinbase manager with insider trading last week. In a 62-page complaint, the agency also listed nine tokens as securities under the Howey Test, sending shockwaves through the industry. If cryptocurrency tokens are securities, they fall under SEC enforcement — and trading platforms like Coinbase would be outside the bounds of the law.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler has long suggested most cryptocurrencies are securities, though he’s never set a definitive rule. Bitcoin, he has said, might be a commodity.

The SEC’s probe into Coinbase predates the insider trading charges, insiders told Bloomberg, but the investigation was not known. Coinbase shares dropped as low as 9.2% on the news, which at worst threatens the company’s core business.

“We are confident that our rigorous diligence process — a process the SEC has already reviewed — keeps securities off our platform,” Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal tweeted Monday evening. In response to a request for additional comment, Coinbase directed Protocol toward that tweet.

The SEC and DOJ’s charges of insider trading were criticized by many in crypto — and by CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham — as “regulation by enforcement.” The argument is that the industry cannot comply with the law if they do not know what those laws are, and that prosecuting entities to clarify legal gray areas will slow innovation. Others point out that prosecution is precisely what law enforcement is designed to do.

Coinbase filed a petition with the SEC shortly after the insider trading charges were announced requesting that the agency propose clear rules governing the trading of “digitally native” securities, as well as clear guidance as to which digital assets should be regulated as securities at all.

Given today’s news, it looks like the agency has other plans.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the date of Paul Grewal's tweet. This story was updated July 26, 2022.

As the Pacific Northwest gears up for searing temperatures for the second year in a row, the Biden administration is rolling out a site to help residents there and across the country prepare for a hotter, more dangerous future.

The site, Heat.gov, is set up to “provide the public and decision-makers with clear, timely and science-based information to understand and reduce the health risks of extreme heat,” according to a press release. With climate change making heat waves more common and intense, there's never been a more crucial time to share information that can help decision-makers put together plans to keep people safe.

The website has been in the works at least since the start of the Biden administration, according to Rick Spinrad, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It emerged as one of the priorities of the president’s National Climate Task Force and its Interagency Working Group on Extreme Heat.

Heat.gov is geared toward a wide range of decision-makers, from companies to local governments to individuals, Spinrad told Protocol, “whether it's a mom trying to decide whether it's safe for kids to play outside, or a construction foreman trying to decide if it's OK for their workers to be out on the job or a public works manager trying to figure out when road repairs can be undertaken.”

The data included is open access, which is designed to help community-level decision-makers integrate it into their own work. The website was created by the National Integrated Heat Health Information System, which is a NOAA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collaboration aimed at heat resilience.

Heat.gov prominently features a counter of how many people in the U.S. are living under a heat warning on any given day (more than 39 million at the time of the site’s launch). It serves as a repository for existing data from across multiple agencies but also features new resources. For instance, the agencies created a heat equity mapper using NIHHIS data on urban heat islands, which also launched Tuesday and seeks to answer the question of whether certain parts of a city get hotter than others.

Heat causes roughly 700 deaths per year in the U.S., making it the deadliest form of extreme weather. And it's only going to worsen with climate change. This summer — which has already seen heat waves roil every region of the U.S. — could easily be the coolest for the rest of our lifetimes, Spinrad said.

The impacts of extreme heat accrue disproportionately in Native American and Black communities, according to the CDC. Indeed, research has shown that neighborhoods subject to redlining — a racist zoning practice that discriminates against communities of colors — are up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than their non-redlined counterparts. Those living in the urban core or in very rural environments are also more impacted by hot weather. Given that the Biden administration wants 40% of all federal funds to benefit communities on the front lines of environmental justice, the heat equity mapper could provide a new avenue to ensure those targets are met when it comes to keeping places cool.

Other agencies that have partnered in the project also include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Veterans Administration and the National Park Service. Heat.gov relies on the geographic information systems provider Esri for the site’s underlying technology.

While the site today is a fairly standard government site, Spinrad said he could imagine “added value service providers” using Heat.gov’s data to create an app or other specialized resource for heat data. This is reminiscent of how companies like AccuWeather have used and built upon NOAA’s fundamental weather forecast in the past.

The geopolitical war over Russian gas has reached a new height. On Monday, state-owned Gazprom said it would curtail its deliveries to Europe. And Tuesday, European Union members agreed to use less methane gas in the coming months.

The Russian war against Ukraine has upended gas prices around the world, but the pressure has been no more acute than in Europe. EU leaders have mulled a plan to cut dependence on Russian gas for months or ban its import entirely. They landed on a 2027 phase-out, but with gas proving to be a major geopolitical weapon for Russia, that timeline may speed up.

The bloc agreed to voluntary cuts to gas demand of up to 15% for the winter, when demand rises for keeping homes warm. If there's a "substantial risk" of a shortage, that could trigger cuts sooner. There are a few exemptions for cutting demand, which were pushed by countries that do not heavily rely on Russian methane gas such as Spain, Portugal and France. The move comes as Gazprom said it would cut the flow of gas through the Nord Stream pipeline to about 20% due to what it claimed was a technical problem. (Germany, which is a major recipient of gas from the pipeline, said its analysis showed "there is no technical reason for a reduction.")

The demand reductions will focus on the electricity sector and getting industries heavily reliant on gas to switch to alternative fuels rather than cutting off supplies to homes and other critical services like hospitals. That said, the bloc agreed to improve heating and cooling efficiency so there's less need for methane gas in the first place. There are a number of other efficiency measures outlined in an International Energy Agency report released earlier this year that could further reduce demand, including letting people work from home and an all-out effort to install tech like heat pumps that heat and cool using electricity rather than methane gas.

The decision to cut the use of gas comes after Europe experienced a blistering heat wave. Many of the solutions that would cut dependence on gas could also pay dividends as the climate continues to heat up. Heat pumps, for example, can be much more efficient than window air conditioning units. Improving insulation and using building materials like concrete that's carbon-negative can keep homes and offices cool in summer and warm in winter as well, further reducing energy demands.

Turning one of the biggest economies on Earth on a dime to cut reliance on the fossil fuels that have powered it for more than a century is no small task, of course. But with both the looming gas shortage in the coming months and what the climate crisis holds in the present and coming decades, there's never been a better time for countries to start that pivot.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is looking for new academic and policy research on how fintechs are changing the banking landscape.

The OCC, which regulates all national banks and federal savings associations, published a solicitation on Monday for research into the impact of "financial technology entities and nonbanks on banking and the markets for lending, deposit-taking and payment services."

The office is especially interested in exploring the challenges that fintechs are presenting to community banks, according to the solicitation. Other categories of interest include "market and operational risks associated with blockchain, decentralized finance, and cryptocurrencies" and "entry by fintech and nonbank entities and fair access to financial services."

The OCC has oversight over how chartered banks use technology and has extended its oversight to fintechs such as Varo and SoFi that have national banking charters.

The office will select papers to be presented to OCC staff in November. Submissions are due by August 21.

Customers locked out of their accounts from the Voyager Digital bankruptcy could get quicker access to part of their claims under a new proposal from FTX and Alameda Ventures.

The firms, both run by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, announced the plan Friday. Under the joint proposal, customers of Voyager could start a new account with FTX with an opening cash balance funded by an early distribution of their bankruptcy claims. Customers could either withdraw the cash immediately or use it to purchase digital assets through FTX.

The plan would require approval from the bankruptcy court overseeing Voyager's case. It would be optional for customers, the firms said, as some may wish to instead pursue their claim through the courts.

Because crypto deposits lack the regulatory protections of traditional banks and brokerages, customer assets held by Voyager could be considered part of the company's bankruptcy estate, with those customers given a low priority to recover them as unsecured creditors.

"Voyager's customers did not choose to be bankruptcy investors holding unsecured claims," Bankman-Fried said. "The goal of our joint proposal is to help establish a better way to resolve an insolvent crypto business — a way that allows customers to obtain early liquidity and reclaim a portion of their assets without forcing them to speculate on bankruptcy outcomes and take one-sided risks."

In a letter to Voyager's attorney posted online Friday, FTX and Alameda described the plan as requiring a two-pronged transaction:

Alameda will purchase all Voyager digital assets and digital asset loans (other than the loans to Three Arrows Capital ('3AC'), discussed below) in immediately available cash at fair market value. Alameda would pay the cash value of Voyager’s digital assets into escrow; and FTX (or an applicable subsidiary thereof) will offer those Voyager customers who on-board with FTX the ability to receive their share of that cash in an account at FTX. Customers could withdraw their cash without gates or lockups or, if they choose, re-invest it in digital assets of their choice. FTX would waive the first month of trading fees for Voyager customers who wish to purchase digital assets rather than withdraw their cash.

Alameda would also write off a $75 million loan claim. The firm would not purchase any claims related to the collapsed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, describing the ongoing Chapter 11 proceeding as "the best place to pursue recoveries relating to Voyager’s loan to 3AC."

Some customers have dollar balances held in accounts on Voyager's behalf at Metropolitan Commercial Bank. "We are open to including or excluding these accounts from the transaction, as best for customers," the FTX letter said.

FTX hopes to close the transaction by mid-August, it said.

It started with an ill-advised photo posted by the most-followed woman on Instagram. Kylie Jenner, the model-turned-mogul, posted a picture with rapper and partner Travis Scott on a tarmac between two private jets with the caption, “you wanna take mine or yours?” The post unleashed a torrent of criticism that has only intensified thanks to a flight-tracking Twitter account that's put the rich's profligate emissions in the spotlight.

The comments on the photo — which have since been closed — called out Jenner, not only for her display of excessive wealth, but also the climate damage of private jet use. The firestorm was bolstered by the findings of Twitter account @CelebJets, which automatically tracks the movements of celebrity planes. The account revealed that Jenner routinely uses her private jet for trips that are under 15 minutes. She’s not alone, either; the account has also shown that celebrities including Floyd Mayweather, Kenny Chesney and Drake are members of the super-short-flight club.

The public outrage over the carbon emissions of the super rich has served as a case study for how new technology and publicly available data can be used for climate accountability. Jack Sweeney, the 19-year-old creator of @CelebJets and many other automated jet-tracking accounts (including the now-infamous @ElonJet), is pleased that his work has had an impact.

“Hopefully it makes people be more careful with their flights or … think more about traveling less or being more efficient,” Sweeney told Protocol.

While his accounts initially used available FAA information to track the departures, intended flight paths and landings of planes Sweeney thought were interesting, in May he adapted the trackers to include fuel use and carbon emissions as well. The estimates are based on the type of plane and how much fuel per hour it burns. He doesn’t have every plane model in there yet, but he’s planning to add more.

There are already companies looking to seize upon the opportunity that @CelebJets has opened up. Sweeney said at least one carbon offset company has reached out about using the trackers to integrate offset payments into celebrity jet travel.

This is a happy development for Sweeney, who pointed out that Bill Gates is already offsetting his private jet travel, and if he can do it, others can, too: “If … more and more people do it, then it should help,” he said.

It remains to be seen if the pressure will pay dividends for the climate. Jet travel is notoriously hard to decarbonize, and offsets come with all sorts of problems from both climate and land rights perspectives.

The scrutiny brought by Sweeney's trackers has rattled at least some private jet travelers, though they may be taking away the wrong message. Musk reached out to Sweeney personally last fall asking him to take down the popular @ElonJet account, offering him $5,000 to do so. That's not exactly a solution that would benefit the climate, though. While Jenner has yet to slide into Sweeney’s DMs, he said both billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban and sales mogul Grant Cardone have done so in recent months.

Sweeney's father works in the airline industry, and Sweeney has been tracking flights since childhood. But he might not be stopping at watching the rich take to the skies. Sweeney got access to data from MarineTraffic, a ship-tracking intelligence company, a few months ago. Though he hasn't yet done anything with it, others are already using similar data to track some billionaires' yachts, including the one owned by Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder.

Using data and technology to reveal private jet and yacht travel does more than create a social media ruckus. It highlights one of the key injustices of climate change: Rich people are responsible for a disproportionate sum of carbon pollution.

Research shows that a single flight across the U.S. in a Gulfstream IV private jet — a particularly popular model — emits twice the amount of carbon dioxide that the average American does in an entire year. A Bloomberg analysis published earlier this year also revealed that the top 1% of the world's highest earners emit a staggering 70 times more carbon dioxide than the bottom 50% combined. These dynamics often play out as background noise, but trackers like Sweeney's are ensuring they're a bigger part of the conversation about how the world should reduce emissions.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the Washington Commanders' name. This story was updated July 22, 2022.

Pico, the VR subsidiary of TikTok owner ByteDance, is preparing to launch a new headset. New filings for a Pico 4 headset passed through the FCC this week, revealing the company's plans to introduce two versions of the headset, which include a “Pico 4 Pro” model.

Both headsets are standalone devices, similar to Meta’s Quest line of wireless devices. The Pro model of the new Pico headset will include face and eye tracking functionality, according to a document included in the filings. The internal code name for the new headset appears to be Phoenix. The product will be running Android Q and make use of a Qualcomm processor.

ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There are few additional details to be learned from the heavily redacted filings, but the new headsets will apparently also launch with a revised controller. Partial device photos show both the controllers and the headset itself will be white, similar to the company’s existing Pico 3 Neo line of devices.

ByteDance acquired Pico a year ago. Prior to that, the VR startup was primarily focused on the enterprise market. More recently, ByteDance has been signaling its intentions to compete more directly with Meta and its Quest line. Pico began selling its current Neo 3 Link headset to consumers in Europe this spring.

An ex-Coinbase product manager was charged on Thursday with insider trading for passing along tips about upcoming listings of tokens on the crypto exchange.

The SEC charged Ishan Wahi and his brother, Nikhil Wahi, and friend Sameer Ramani in federal district court in Seattle.

Ishan Wahi, who worked on Coinbase's announcements of newly listed crypto tokens, allegedly passed information about the listings to his brother and Ramani, who purchased at least 25 crypto assets from June 2021 to April 2022.

The SEC in its release alleged that at least nine of the 25 assets were securities, but did not indicate which ones it considered securities. Those designations will likely be of intense interest to the industry, since the SEC has not publicly identified many tokens that it considers securities and which are hence subject to strict regulation by the commission.

Coinbase's listings of tokens have attracted considerable interest, because a listing on the crypto exchange usually draws in more trading activity and liquidity. Prices often rise after a listing, either because of the increased liquidity, speculative betting or a combination of both. Some parties scoured Coinbase activity and documents to glean insights into tokens it might list.

The three earned more than $1.1 million through the benefits of the inside information, the SEC alleges.

The Seattle federal complaint charges the three with antifraud violations of securities laws, and another coordinated complaint in the Southern District of New York includes criminal charges against them.

In April, Coinbase announced it would post a list of tokens that it was considering listing to increase transparency. Coinbase said its changes would improve "information symmetry."

Amazon is buying primary health care company One Medical for roughly $3.9 billion, the companies announced Thursday morning. The company says the deal will allow it to "reinvent" health care and "dramatically improve the healthcare experience over the next several years," said Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services.

One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin said in a statement that the deal represents an opportunity to merge Amazon's "customer obsession" with One Medical's health care technology and expertise. Rubin will remain CEO upon completion of the deal, with Amazon acquiring the company for $18 per share in an all-cash transaction. The deal is subject to approval by federal antitrust regulators and requires approval by One Medical shareholders.

One Medical, owned by parent company 1Life Healthcare, was founded in 2007 in San Francisco. The boutique primary care company now has 188 medical offices in 25 markets and has more than 8,500 enterprise clients across the country, according to its latest quarterly results. It has a direct-to-consumer, membership-based model and has made a big push into telehealth since the beginning of the pandemic. The company went public in 2020.

Amazon has delved deeper into the health care space in recent years, growing its brick-and-mortar health care clinic presence and expanding its telehealth service, Amazon Care. It also bought online pharmacy company PillPack in 2018. Haven, Amazon's previous venture with Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan to disrupt employee health care, fell apart in 2021 after three years. The move to buy One Medical signals Amazon's ambition to dive into broader primary care.

Varo has laid off 75 employees as part of an effort, the neobank said, to move toward profitability.

CEO Colin Walsh wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the company "must make some difficult decisions to ensure that Varo has sufficient capital to execute on our strategy and path to profitability." The cuts represent a little less than 10% of the company's staff, according to head count estimates on LinkedIn.

Varo, which provides online checking and saving accounts along with other services, was the first consumer neobank to secure a national banking license with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

After the fintech sector saw record investment totals in 2021, the appetite from venture capitalists to bet on fintech firms has cooled considerably this year. Varo joins a list of fintechs to conduct layoffs in recent months that includes Klarna, Bolt and Robinhood.

Varo in September raised a $510 million series E round at a $2.5 billion valuation.

First-quarter filings with banking regulators showed Varo was burning through its capital quickly and risked running out of money by the end of the year, as first detailed in the Fintech Business Weekly newsletter. Walsh told Banking Dive that "we remain very well capitalized and have sufficient capital to reach profitability, without having to raise additional capital."

The company, founded seven years ago, is establishing a new business unit called Varo Tech, according to Walsh's announcement. The department will "bring together the technology, design, data and product functions under a single umbrella" to increase speed and reduce costs, Walsh said.

The company, through a spokesperson, declined to share further detail on what jobs are being cut through the layoffs.

Minecraft developer Mojang, a subsidiary of Microsoft, said on Wednesday it was instituting a ban on blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens integrating with its game client or making use of any of the game's assets like mods, items and character skins.

The company posted a blog post titled "Minecraft and NFTs" and acknowledged that some creators and companies have begun launching NFT projects associated with Minecraft world files and skin packs. The post also suggested Minecraft creators may use the game as a platform to create and sell collectible NFTs that players could earn through activities performed on a Minecraft server or as a reward for activities in the real world.

"To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods," Mojang wrote in the post.

"We will also be paying close attention to how blockchain technology evolves over time to ensure that the above principles are withheld and determine whether it will allow for more secure experiences or other practical and inclusive applications in gaming," the company added. "However, we have no plans of implementing blockchain technology into Minecraft right now."

The traditional game industry has begun to distance itself from NFTs over the past few months following backlash from players and a crashing crypto market. Sony last week said it would be launching a digital collectibles feature as part of a new PlayStation rewards program, but clarified emphatically that it its collectibles were "definitely not NFTs." Ubisoft, which became the first major game publisher to experiment with NFTs last fall, shut down its experiment after four months. Last October, Steam marketplace owner Valve said it would not permit any games using blockchain or NFT technology, though Fortnite creator Epic Games recently opened the door to such products on its PC game store.

Microsoft has not issued a strong opinion on the subject as it relates to its library of gaming properties before now. But Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told Protocol last year he was "leery" of the "near-term kind of hysteria around NFTs" and the potential for scams, fraud and the pyramid scheme nature of the crypto market leading to consumers losing vast sums of real money very quickly. Spencer separately told Axios last fall that NFTs had the potential to be exploitative and that the market contained "a lot of things that probably are not things you want to have in your store."

Mojang's blog post expresses similar sentiments. "Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together," the company wrote. "NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players."

The studio said it was also worried about fraud and that third-party NFT technology could result in a loss of assets for consumers, situations that "may end up costing players who buy them."

Surprise! The Postal Service is purchasing more electric delivery vehicles than it had previously said it would. The agency is more than doubling its buy, though it's still far short of electrifying its whole fleet.

The USPS is in the midst of a multiyear process to turn over its fleet of aging and fire-prone delivery vehicles. Its initial order of 50,000 next generation delivery vehicles from Oshkosh Defense included just 10,019 EVs, with the rest being gas-powered. But the agency told Reuters that it would be boosting its total EV purchase to 25,000 delivery vehicles. Overall, at least 40% of USPS's 84,500 vehicles purchased in the coming years will be EVs, by the agency's estimate.

This is the latest development in the Postal Service's ongoing EV drama that's involved Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, states and nonprofits all hammering the agency over its decision to buy mostly gas-powered vehicles.

In April, the House Oversight and Reform Committee grilled the agency about its failure to electrify its fleet. Despite the pressure then, the agency refused to budge on its plan to purchase tens of thousands of new gas-powered vehicles. Later that month, a group of 16 states and some environmental groups sued USPS for not electrifying its fleet faster.

The agency has cited the cost, its own financial situation and the challenges of using EVs in rural areas as reasons for its gas-powered purchase plan. But its own inspector general refuted some of those issues in testimony before the Oversight and Reform Committee in April. EVs are also generally more cost-effective for a variety of reasons, but particularly now with surging gas prices.

For context, USPS's existing fleet of 217,000 aging trucks is the largest share of the federal government's civilian vehicle fleet. The Biden administration has said it wants to throw the weight of the government behind addressing the climate crisis, including transitioning the entire federal fleet of vehicles to zero-emissions models by 2027. That would help bring EV costs down for the average car buyer, speeding up the transition to electrified transit in the U.S. (Transportation is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country.)

The USPS is an independent agency, though, and is run by Trump holdover Louis DeJoy. The financial constraints on the agency are also real, thanks to a 2006 law, and USPS has said it needs more money from Congress to go fully electric. Wednesday's news that it's increasing its purchase of EVs, though, is a sign that the public pressure could be changing its calculus a bit.

Get ready to pay up to share your Netflix account: The streaming service will begin to crack down on password sharing starting next year, the company announced in its letter to investors Tuesday. That's also when Netflix plans to launch an ad-supported tier.

"Our goal is to find an easy-to-use paid sharing offering that we believe works for our members and our business that we can roll out in 2023," the company wrote. The letter also states that Netflix is aiming to launch an ad-supported tier "around the early part of 2023."

Netflix first announced plans to monetize shared accounts and launch a cheaper, ad-supported tier in April. The company struck a deal with Microsoft to sell and power its ads last week.

Netflix executives have said in the past there were an estimated 100 million households who participated in account sharing. The company had already begun a test asking people to pay more for the ability to share their accounts in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru.

On Monday, the company announced a separate test with a slightly different approach: Starting in August, Netflix will ask members in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to pay more if they want to stream to more than one home.

"We’re encouraged by our early learnings and ability to convert consumers to paid sharing in Latin America," the company said Tuesday.

Netflix also announced Tuesday that it had lost another 0.97 million subscribers in Q2. The company expects to add 1 million subscribers in Q3, compared to 4.38 million added subscribers in Q3 of 2021.

Disclosure: Protocol is owned by Axel Springer, whose chairman and chief executive officer, Mathias Döpfner, is on the board of Netflix.

Google and Oracle data centers in the U.K. were struggling to operate Tuesday as record high temperatures continue to heat up Europe.

According to Google Cloud's service health page, one of its London buildings hosting cloud services for one of its Western Europe regions experienced a "cooling related failure" starting Tuesday morning. The company powered down services in part of that region to fix the issue.

Meanwhile, Oracle is having similar issues. Its service health page said it's working to repair the cooling system in its London data center and has powered down some of its services to "to prevent uncontrolled hardware failures." Oracle said it expects service to be restored today.

"As the operating temperatures approach workable levels, some services may start to see recovery," Oracle's service page said.

Though major data centers often have thousands of gallons of water at their disposal for cooling, they're not immune to heat waves. Prior to Tuesday's outages, an AWS data center in London went out July 10 in what the company called a "thermal event." Some data center operators are even resorting to hosing down their roof-mounted AC units with water to keep working.

Data centers are facing issues, but so, too, are everyday people. The heat wave currently roasting the EU and U.K. is being made worse by climate change, and the effects have been relentless. Hundreds died in Spain and Portugal over the weekend amid the intense heat that topped out at 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius) and wildfires burning across the countryside. Nuclear power plants were also forced to operate at reduced capacity in France due to overheating river water normally used for cooling.

The epicenter of heat has since moved to the U.K. to start the week, where the nation saw its first-ever 40-degree-Celsius (104-degree-Fahrenheit) temperature reading and has seen fires rage near London. Just 5% of homes in the U.K. have air conditioning installed. There are a number of high- and low-tech solutions that could help beat the heat, a task that will only become more important as climate change increases the intensity and frequency of freakishly hot weather.

This post has been updated with additional context.