Tech
AWS brings OpenSearch under the Linux Foundation umbrella
AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very aptly named OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed its license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors opted for similar changes, largely in an effort to prevent the large cloud providers — and especially AWS — from offering hosted services based on their software.
Somewhat ironically, this move comes only a few weeks after Elastic announced that it would once again offer Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, the AGPL, which requires its users to publish all of their source code if they made any changes. Interestingly, though, Elastic opted to make this an option that will be available in parallel with its own more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people that really like ELv2.”
When AWS created OpenSearch, there was quite a bit of skepticism around the project. For the most part, after all, AWS had never managed such a large project. Mukul Karnik, AWS’ general manager for its search services, acknowledged as much.
“When we created OpenSearch at that time, it was new for Amazon and AWS to take over an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “From early on, our goal was to be community-driven and see how we can get more community members be part of the project and contribute.”
Karnik noted that AWS has progressively opened up the project, encouraging both contributions and broader governance. “It became more organic, in some ways, where we are doing these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to be part of the project.”
With today’s launch, a number of other large companies, including SAP and Uber are joining the Foundation as premier members, with Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 joining as general members.
Karnik noted that AWS expects to grow its contributions to OpenSearch.
Back in 2021, a foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but bringing the project into its own foundation now feels like the natural next step, Karnik said. He also noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite a few of its own innovations to the project, including moving it from a cluster-based system to a more cloud-native architecture. He also noted that the project recently introduced updates like the separation of compute and storage, as well as segment replication. With the advent of AI, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.
The new Foundation will follow the usual Linux Foundation governance model, with a governing board and a technical steering committee.
“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day, for both business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools for organizations and individuals around the world.”
Like with so many similar foundations, one of the reasons why AWS decided to contribute the project now is to gain access to the services and expertise of the Linux Foundation in managing and growing open-source projects. In addition, this move helps OpenSearch shed its perception as primarily an AWS-driven project, a crucial step for continued growth and broader adoption.
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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