Tech
Last 24 hours to grab your plus-one pass at 50% off to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
This is it. The clock is running out. With demand surging and early inventory nearly gone, tonight is your last chance to lock in record-low pricing for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and secure a plus-one pass at 50% off while limited passes remain.
If Disrupt has been on your must-attend list, now is the moment to act. Save up to $680 on your pass and bring a plus-one for half the price before this offer disappears.
This pricing ends tonight, January 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT, or the moment the last plus-one pass sells out. No extensions. No exception. Register now to secure yours with the lowest-priced offer.
What Disrupt delivers year after year
This year, Disrupt takes over San Francisco’s Moscone West from October 13–15, bringing together 10,000 founders, VCs, operators, and tech leaders for a tightly curated, three-day experience focused on real outcomes.
Attendees return for:
- High-signal access to people actively building and investing.
- Conversations that turn into deals, partnerships, and hires.
- Tactical insights you can use immediately.
- A front-row view into the future of tech before it breaks mainstream.
With 300+ startups expected to showcase their innovations, the intensity of Startup Battlefield 200, and curated networking designed to drive results, Disrupt isn’t just another conference. It’s where momentum is built.

A more curated way to experience a tech event
Disrupt isn’t about wandering between sessions. It’s about intentional connections and curated experiences designed for how people actually grow in tech.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
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June 23, 2026
Founders meet investors actively backing breakthrough ideas. VCs cut through the noise to discover startups aligned with their investment focus. Operators exchange real-world lessons on building, scaling, and shipping what’s next. Aspiring innovators get a front-row seat to tomorrow’s tech.
If you’re hands-on in tech, Disrupt was built for you.
Insights delivered straight to you from tech’s top voices

Each Disrupt brings together 250+ of the most influential names in tech, leaders who have shaped the industry and continue to define what’s next:
Keep an eye on the Disrupt 2026 event page as the agenda goes live to see who will take the stage this year.

Final warning: Plus-one passes almost gone
The 50% off plus-one passes are nearly sold out, and the countdown to the best offer of the year ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. PT. Register now to lock in your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket. Save up to $680 and bring a plus-one at half the price while you still can.

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.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
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October 13-15, 2026
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].”

