Business
Nancy Pelosi’s flight to Taiwan crashes flight radar
The flight carrying the third most senior political figure in the U.S. has become the most-tracked flight in history
As U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was high above the clouds, users began flocking to the popular FlightRadar24 smartphone app.
It’s understood 2.92 million people were on the app and website to follow the U.S. Air Force jet with the callsign ‘SPAR 19’.
“Because of unprecedented sustained tracking interest in SPAR19, Flightradar24 services are under extremely heavy load,” FlightRadar24 said.
The jet was forced to detour over Indonesia to avoid any potential issues in the South China Sea.
Beijing warned the U.S. against the Taiwan visit, as authorities prepare to hold military drills across six areas near the democratically-ruled island.
“Some users may currently experience issues accessing the site, our teams are working on restoring full functionality to all users as quickly as possible.”
FLIGHTRADAR24
The Boeing C-40C landed in Taipei, with 708,000 people tracking the flight when it touched down.
The average flight time between Pelosi’s origin of Kuala Lumpur to Taipei is around four hours. However, SPAR19 took over seven hours to reach Taiwan.
“Unfortunately, due to the volume of users, it was necessary to deploy our waiting room functionality, which meters access to Flightradar24 for non-subscribers,” the website said.
After SPAR19 touched down, access was restored quickly for FlightRadar24 users.
“We continue to make improvements to our systems to provide additional capacity for flights of extreme interest,” the website said.
WhatsApp ramps up privacy features to prevent subscriber loss
The world’s two billion plus WhatsApp users will soon have greater privacy controls with new platform changes on the way.
Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new WhatsApp updates in a Facebook post earlier this week.
Users will be able to make a stealthy exit from group conversations without the rest of the participants being notified.
Other changes include allowing users the ability to check messages without others knowing and controlling who sees when they are online.
These functions have been flagged as being rolled out to WhatsApp users over the next month.
Even more significant to user privacy is a function that is still under development.
Here, WhatsApp users can allow their messages to be viewed only once with an added screenshot blocking feature.
This will prevent other users saving their communication onto their phones for future reference.
The changes have been announced after Meta was scrutinised last year for their data sharing practices after an update of its Terms of Service.
Users were concerned over suggestions WhatsApp user data would be shared and utilised by parent company Meta.
WhatsApp has always boasted about the benefits of its end-to-end encryption preventing.
The news that WhatsApp planned to share user data more widely with Meta shook users’ faith in the platform.
As the third most popular social media platform, it seems Meta is keen to retain this market share by increasing its privacy features.
Some would say this is both to allay security fears and to prevent them from moving to other popular messaging apps such as Signal.
As frustrated customers take their anger out on the remaining airport checkin staff, airline executives are being forced onto the front line to face customers.
The return of summer in Europe has been overshadowed by travel chaos, leaving passengers frustrated and often out of pocket.
Thousands of people have been left to battle airport queues that last hours, long delays and thousands of cancellations.
Airports and airlines face staff shortages forcing them to reduce the number of scheduled flights – often at short notice.
It’s a global problem, with airports and airlines rushing to hire back the thousands of positions they axed at the start of covid.
But how do you do it, and how long until things return to normal?
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