Roblox in Trouble

👋 Welcome to HackerNoon's Tech Company News Brief, a weekly collection of tech goodness that combines HackerNoon's proprietary data with internet trends to determine which companies are rising and falling in the public consciousness. Tell your friends and family to subscribe here.

Imagine having to sign up for a new phone app using Facebook only to find that your login information has been stolen. Apparently, that's what happened to ~1 million Facebook users whose login information may have been compromised via malicious apps.

While they might look and feel authentic, at least at first glance, Facebook listed a number of red flags that users may have ignored or been unaware of. The social media giant has notified affectees and also shared details of the 400 malicious apps that were stealing users' information to Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. so they're removed from their app stores.

Outside of the security breach, the internet was busy discussing Facebook's lofty attempts at bringing the metaverse to the masses. The company's metaverse app Horizon Worlds is so bad that even Facebook's own employees don’t like it, The Verge reports. What's worse is that the exec in charge of building and growing Horizon Worlds is forcing employees to plug into the app and "fall in love" with it.

It's still far too early to tell what the metaverse will evolve into, and as this New York Times reporter correctly points out, explaining the metaverse through the lens of Horizon Worlds would be like describing the internet from the lens of AOL chatrooms (for the non-Boomers, AOL was an instant messenger that was eventually replaced by social media). Still, the reporter's overall impression of Horizon Worlds was positive (far more than Facebook's own employees) even though she met a lot more children than she had anticipated.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is already betting his all on the potential of the metaverse, and with the Connect event right around the corner, we'll get to hear more about the future of the industry from the CEO himself.

Facebook was trending at the top of this week's Tech Rankings. 👑

Powerful Chip Lineup Not Enough to Save AMD Revenues 💵

AMD's newly-released Ryzen 7000 chips may have the lead on performance over Intel's 12th generation processors, but the celebration was short lived. The Santa Clara-based company informed markets this past Thursday that it may have been a bit too optimistic about its sales forecast, issuing a course correction around the tune of $1 billion.

With the COVID-19 pandemic virtually over and people no longer confined to their homes, businesses are reporting earnings the way they should have been before the coronavirus forced the entire world to a standstill. AMD and its peers, Nvidia and Intel, benefited greatly from the lockdown when consumers bought or upgraded their machines for gaming or work, resulting in massive sales for the tech companies. Now, consumers aren't that inclined to splurge, raising fears of a tech downturn that could last a while.

Nvidia was trending #57 this week while Intel was trending at the #64 spot.

Roblox Gets Flak 👨‍⚖️

Roblox too benefitted greatly from COVID-19-related lockdowns but was in the news this week for a wholly different reason. A lawsuit filed in San Francisco accuses the youth-centered gaming platform of enabling the sexual and financial exploitation of an underage girl by adult men, causing the victim to attempt suicide.

Now, if you've followed Roblox for any length of time, you know that its platform attracts all manners of pedophiles who try to groom a young audience. So the lawsuit itself is not surprising; however, it does go a step further by also holding Discord, Snapchat, and Meta responsible for enabling the exploitation and the overall decline in the victim's mental health.

Roblox ranked #2 this week. F*ck pedos.

At least One Tech Behemoth Gets It (Maybe) ⛅

Amazon is taking climate change seriously. At least, enough to announce a €1 billion plan to upgrade its truck fleet in Europe over the next five years, Reuters reports.

The investment will see the world's largest eCommerce business more than triple its electric van fleet in Europe to 10,000 vehicles while investing in thousands of charger stations at facilities across Europe. It will also invest in doubling its European network of "micro-mobility" hubs from more than 20 cities today, Reuters reported.

Amazon ranked #3 this week.

And that’s a wrap! Thanks for reading Tech Company News Brief Issue #20! See y’all next week. PEACE ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon