Squirrels run amok.
At a Meta office.
It wasn’t a virus or a leak. Just a rogue rodent taking over the workspace for a bit. Nature reclaims all eventually, it seems. 🐿️
Then came the AI hackathon announcement. Mark Zuckerberg wanted a companywide event to show off AI skills. The staff didn’t want it.
“I’m not sure that this company supports a Hackathon culture anymore,” one person typed in a thread visible to everyone. The tone wasn’t just apathetic. It was dead.
Dead culture. Live data.
Meta exposed internal data from a program designed to track employees.
It was supposed to help train AI.
Instead it captured keystrokes. Private ones. Employees had screamed about it. Now the sensitive data sat exposed inside the company’s own systems. Meta paused the program after the leak. Of course. It had to be a crisis before the plug got pulled.
Chaos reigns elsewhere.
The new AI unit is a mess.
Sources tell WIRED that executives are struggling. So are the regular workers. Someone actually wrote a note suggesting colleagues should “Tell him he’s a piece of shit.”
Morale? Low.
Strategy? Non-existent.
WIRED found contractors for Meta posing as teens online.
Hundreds of them.
They tricked rival chatbots—Gemini, ChatGPT. They asked about suicide. Drugs. Sex. They wanted to see how the competition would react to high-risk prompts from fake kids. It feels less like research and more like provocation.
Speaking of provocation, the federal workers can’t delete the White House app.
They tried.
They deleted it. It came right back. One worker called it a test, then confirmed the return was immediate. It stays on the phone. Whether they like it or not.
Over at Amazon, three engineers say they’re under investigation.
Why?
For speaking out about data centers. They filed a civil rights complaint in Seattle, claiming Amazon is retaliating against them for their political beliefs. Software engineers usually just fix bugs. These three are fighting the system.
Systems also catch people.
One Meta employee got detained by immigration agents right after losing their job. Colleagues talked about it on internal boards. WIRED saw the docs. It was brutal. Fast. Real life doesn’t pause for corporate drama, even when the drama is real.
Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, admits it was bad.
He called the AI reorganization “atrocious.”
It wasn’t a mild slip-up. An internal memo shows Bosworth promising stability now. Better communication. He’s throwing workplace perks back into the mix, hoping to fix morale. Did he start that sentence mid-thought? Probably. We all do.
Two more disasters hit the list.
Venezuela took a double-whammy. Two massive earthquakes in under a minute. 7.5 magnitude.
The interim leader declared an emergency.
Thousands might be dead. No one knows for sure yet. The ground shakes and then everything changes.
Then the UK decided to scan asylum-seekers.
Facial recognition. Age checks.
Home Office tests already proved the tech is flawed. Life-altering errors happen with the current systems.
They know it doesn’t work right.
It’s moving forward anyway.
Who are we trying to trick? The computers? The courts? Or ourselves?
“Internal tests show the risks.”
Yet they press the button.
Tech breaks. Earth breaks.
People just try to keep up. Sometimes that means dodging squirrels. Sometimes it means dodging agents. Other times, it’s just staring at an app you can’t uninstall while the world burns in the background.
