Twitter, Wordle, ChatGPT among 20 tech highlights of 2022
Crashes and crackdowns
9. Tech retrenchments
News headlines about employees being let go kept appearing as major tech companies like Meta, Twitter and Microsoft cut thousands of jobs amid economic uncertainties. It marked an abrupt stop to the hiring spree of past years, boosted by the growth of digitalisation amid the pandemic. The authorities in Singapore have maintained that tech jobs are still widely available here owing to the growth of digital services.
10. Crypto crashes
The collapse of several cryptocurrency players sent investors into panic. Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced founder of now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, made headlines in November after he filed for bankruptcy in the United States and resigned from the company. Investors that have lost millions include Singapore’s Temasek, which wrote off its $377 million investment in FTX. Separately, Terraform Labs’ co-founder Do Kwon is on the run, with a US$56.9 million lawsuit in Singapore hanging over him for his alleged role in a wipeout of his company’s TerraUSD stablecoin and Luna token. The downfall of these platforms underscores the failure of corporate controls and dangers of hype in the field.
11. WhatsApp outage
The widely used online messaging app may have been down for only a few hours in October, but the crash affected millions of users globally. Business users, for example, were temporarily cut off from their clients. The outage, reportedly caused by a technical error, is a reminder to netizens to have alternative chat apps on standby in case of another crash, said cyber-security experts.
12. Counter-ransomware task force assembled
Singapore set up an inter-agency task force to help businesses and major institutions tackle the growing threat of ransomware. The number of cases reported here grew from 89 in 2020 to 137 in 2021, according to the Cyber Security Agency. In November, the task force published a blueprint for Singapore to counter such attacks, signalling the steps that enterprises and the Government should take to combat the scourge.
13. Crackdown on online harms
Singapore doubled down on its fight against online harms, with a proposed law that is set to launch in 2023 and will give…
