Ford Recalls EV Mustangs; Redfin Lays off 8% of Workforce; Twitch-More Money for Streamers; RIP Microsoft Internet ‘Exploder’

Ford has announced a recall for 48,924 Mustang Mach-E EVs and asked dealers to pause deliveries of the vehicle. Engadget.com reports that Ford says  there’s a possibility of the high-voltage battery connectors overheating, which could prevent the vehicle from starting or cause it to lose propulsion power while on the road. Ford claims it should be able to fix the issue with an over-the-air software update, which will be rolled out next month… or, owners can take their Mach-E to a Ford or Lincoln dealer and have the update installed there. Affected vehicles were built between May 27th, 2020, and May 24th, 2022 at Ford’s factory in Cuautitlán, Mexico.

Seattle real estate company Redfin announced Tuesday that it is cutting about 8% of its workforce, acknowledging that a housing downturn in the U.S. is hitting the company hard. According to geek wire.com, the company is blaming “market conditions” in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, and Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman said in a note to employees, which was posted on the company’s blog, that “a layoff is always an awful shock, especially when I’ve said that we’d go through heck to avoid one.” But May demand was 17% below expectations, he added, and fewer sales left the company with “less money for headquarters projects.” The cuts will impact approximately 470 employees and are expected to be completed by the end of June. 

Twitch is expanding its ad incentive program to include more creators and pay them more money. Theverge.com notes that earlier this year, Twitch began offering select streamers a flat, guaranteed payment in exchange for running a fixed amount of ads during a fixed number of hours. Now, Twitch is opening up the program to include more partners and is changing the way it structures payouts to pay creators more. The payouts earned with the ad incentive program were calculated using a CPM (cost per thousand model.) The platform now says they will go to a more understandable model which increases the share for streamers. The new system will pay creators 55 percent of the revenue for each ad that runs on their stream. The program will roll out June 15th, but no one will see the bump until August. ‘Affiliates’ will qualify for the 55 percent of ad revenue starting in August so long as they run three minutes of ads per hour. Twitch will also disable the highly annoying pre-roll ads for users who run ads for that same amount of time.

A moment of silence….or if you are inclined, darken your screen for a few moments. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is dead. Redmond is killing off IE today after nearly 27 years. Most Windows systems already have the successor, Microsoft Edge. Not many users will miss ‘Internet Exploder.’ According to theverge.com, IE has less than half a percent of overall browser market share. Microsoft has been trying to stop people from using Internet Explorer for years now, and the company previously labeled it a “compatibility solution” rather than a browser that businesses should actively be using. While Microsoft has moved to its Chromium-powered Edge as the default browser on Windows 11, the MSHTML engine that powers Internet Explorer is still part of Windows 11. It exists purely for IE mode in Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft says it will support IE mode in Edge through at least 2029.