Tech
Automattic planned to target 10 competitors with royalty fees, WP Engine claims in new filing
Web hosting company WP Engine has filed an amended complaint with brow-raising new allegations in its ongoing legal battle with WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and his company Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company). The company now claims that Mullenweg intended to target 10 different hosting companies with royalty payments for their use of the WordPress trademark and tried to get payment processor Stripe to cancel its contract with WP Engine.
At the heart of the dispute, Mullenweg believes WP Engine is profiting from the open source WordPress project without contributing back to the community, and demanded the hosting company pay 8% of its monthly gross revenues as a royalty fee for using the WordPress brand.
The suit, originally filed by WP Engine in October 2024, accused Automattic and Mullenweg of defamation and abuse of power. Automattic filed its counterclaims last year, alleging that the hosting company has been abusing the WordPress trademark and engaging in deceptive marketing practices.
In this latest filing, WP Engine has amended its complaint for the third time after gaining access to information that was uncovered during the discovery process. The information, now unredacted, had been previously sealed at Automattic’s request.
Notably, one of the new claims accuses Automattic of allegedly planning to target 10 other competitors with royalty claims similar to those aimed at WP Engine.
The complaint also states that Newfold, a company whose portfolio includes hosting providers like Bluehost and HostGator, among others, is already paying Automattic for use of its trademarks and that Automattic is in conversations with others. (Names of the other hosts were redacted in the complaint, which referenced email conversations between those companies and Mullenweg.)
WP Engine is also alleging that Mullenweg reached out to a Stripe executive via email to pressure the company to cancel WP Engine’s contract. This occurred after WP Engine had filed its lawsuit against Automattic, the complaint states.
The filing also challenges the 8% rate for the royalty payments as being somewhat arbitrary. Referencing Mullenweg’s comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, WP Engine claims that the Automattic founder essentially came up with the rate because it was what he thought WP Engine “could afford to pay.”
At Disrupt, Mullenweg had responded to a question about how he settled on the 8% fee by saying it was based on a “business analysis.”
“If you estimate that would be about $32 million — they still would have been free cash-flow positive, and based on our estimates, and the negotiations over the past 18 months, we felt like that was a fair amount,” he said at the event.
Other new claims in the filing point to aggressive language Mullenweg allegedly used against WP Engine, like threats that if the web hosting provider didn’t comply, he would start stealing its customers. “If they don’t take the carrot, we’ll give them the stick,” was one of the quotes cited from internal correspondence at Automattic, for instance.
The complaint also includes allegations that Mullenweg used the term “nuclear war” to describe his approach to WP Engine’s defiance.
Asked about the new filing, Automattic shared the following statement with TechCrunch: “There is nothing new here. This is the same narrative WP Engine has been pushing for over a year, and the Court has already dismissed many of its central claims. The lawsuit is going nowhere. This latest filing simply repackages the same tired allegations in an effort to keep the story alive. WP Engine is trying to recast robust competition as something nefarious. We are confident the courts will continue to reject that theory.”
Updated after publication with Automattic’s statement.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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