Tech Industry Faces Turmoil: Leadership Changes, Outages, and Ethical Concerns
The tech industry is currently grappling with a series of significant events, including leadership shakeups, service outages, ethical concerns surrounding immigration enforcement, and strategic shifts in research priorities.
PayPal announced on Tuesday the appointment of Enrique Lores, current chair of PayPal's board since July 2024, as its new CEO and President, replacing Alex Chriss. According to PayPal, the change was prompted by the board's assessment that the company's "pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations given broader market trends." Chriss had only joined PayPal in September 2023, succeeding Dan Schulman. Jamie Miller, PayPal's CFO and COO, will serve as interim CEO until Lores assumes the role. The announcement coincided with PayPal's report of lower-than-expected revenue and profit in the fourth quarter, attributed to decreased consumer spending amid a cost-of-living crisis and a softening labor market.
Meanwhile, Anthropic's Claude AI models experienced a major outage on February 3, 2026, impacting products like Claude Code. Developers encountered 500 errors when attempting to use Claude Code. Anthropic reported "elevated error rates on its APIs across all Claude models." According to The Verge, Anthropic identified the root cause and implemented a fix within approximately 20 minutes, but developers had already taken a "long coffee break" during the disruption.
OpenAI is also undergoing internal changes, prioritizing the advancement of ChatGPT over long-term research, which has led to the departure of senior staff. According to Ars Technica, the San Francisco-based company is reallocating resources from experimental work to enhance its flagship chatbot, due to increasing competition from rivals such as Google and Anthropic. Jerry Tworek, vice-president of research, model policy researcher Andrea Vallone, and economist Tom Cunningham are among those who have left OpenAI in recent months due to this strategic shift.
In other news, TikTok has largely recovered from a slight dip in active users following its ownership change, when a group of American investors took control of the video app's operations in the United States. According to estimates from digital market intelligence firm Similarweb, TikTok saw usage dip into the range of 86-88 million daily active users in the U.S. immediately after the ownership change, compared with a typical average of 92 million daily active users. The app has since bounced back to more than 90 million daily active users, indicating that many who left TikTok have since returned. Competing video apps like UpScrolled and Skylight Social saw rapid user adoption as some looked for TikTok alternatives.
The tech industry is also facing scrutiny regarding its involvement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). TechCrunch reports that the Trump administration's approach to immigration has led to violence, with federal immigration agents allegedly killing at least eight people in 2026, including at least two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As immigration enforcement has grown more extreme, tech workers have called on their leaders to speak up. Companies like Palantir, Clearview AI, Flock, and Paragon are contracted by ICE and assist in the agency's crackdowns.
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