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US Embassy in Venezuela Reopens as TikTok Restores Service After Outage
The United States took a step toward normalizing relations with Venezuela, reopening its diplomatic mission in Caracas on Saturday, February 1st, 2026, after seven years of closure. This move followed the fall of Nicolás Maduro and the partial release of political prisoners, almost a month after a U.S. military operation deposed the former Venezuelan president, according to Euronews. Laura Dogu, the U.S. chargé d'affaires for Venezuela, arrived in the South American country to lead the reopened embassy.
Meanwhile, in the United States, TikTok announced on Sunday, February 2nd, 2026, that its services were restored after an outage that impacted user experience the previous week. The social network, which has over 220 million users in the U.S., attributed the outage to a severe winter storm. "We have successfully restored TikTok back to normal after a significant outage caused by winter weather took down a primary U.S. data center site operated by Oracle," the company stated, according to TechCrunch. The storm caused a power outage that led to network and storage issues, affecting tens of thousands of servers responsible for TikTok's operations in the U.S. This impacted core features such as content posting, discovery, and the real-time display of video likes.
In Washington D.C., a partial government shutdown continued into the week, with House Speaker Mike Johnson blaming Democrat lawmakers for the impasse. Johnson expressed confidence that he had enough votes to end the shutdown by Tuesday, February 4th, 2026, Euronews reported. The shutdown, which began on Saturday, stemmed from disagreements between Democrats and Republicans over immigration enforcement operations.
In other tech news, digital meeting notetakers are becoming increasingly popular. TechCrunch highlighted physical AI notetakers and transcription tools like Plaud Note and Plaud Note Pro, which record audio and provide users with summaries and action items of meetings using AI. Some devices offer live translation.
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