Adobe buys Figma, Uber gets hacked and Google shrinks Area 120 • TechCrunch

Hi friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly recap the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven days. The goal? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick dash of WiR should keep you in the (technical) loop.

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This week was a bit all over the place, with another big story breaking every couple of hours. Let’s just drop by, shall we?

most read

• Cuts in area 120: Area 120 is Google’s internal incubator, meant to let Googlers with potentially big ideas use the mega-corporation’s resources to turn said ideas into something real. However, this week Google confirmed that it is cutting half of its Area 1[ads1]20 projects in development and the incubator is “shifting its focus” to AI projects. Affected employees will have until early 2023 to find a new job at Google.
• Adobe buys Figma: In one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time, Adobe announced this week its intention to buy collaborative/online design tool Figma for a whopping $20 billion. Figma saw ridiculous growth through the pandemic, as many, many technology teams went remote and adjusted their workflows accordingly. Even for a company as large as Adobe, it would be difficult to win back that part of the workflow.
• Layoffs at Twilio: Twilio confirmed this week that it will lay off about 11% of its workforce — somewhere between 800 and 900 people — as the company focuses on reaching profitability by 2023.
• iOS 16 goes live: As expected, iOS 16 rolled out to Apple devices this week. Want our thoughts on that? Find Romain’s review here. Want to know all the not-so-obvious new features hidden in the update? Check out Ivan’s list. Most of our readers seem to be looking for interesting ways to use the new lock screen widgets.
• South Korea issues an arrest warrant for Terraform Labs’ founder: “A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs,” writes Manish, “escalating his probe into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens lost $40 billion in value in a matter of days earlier this year.”
• Uber hack: Late Thursday night, Uber confirmed it is “responding to a cybersecurity incident” after a hacker apparently breached the company’s internal network, with the hacker reportedly announcing their presence (and protesting how Uber pays its drivers) right inside Uber’s Slack.

audio summary

If you like TechCrunch for your eyes, check out TechCrunch for your ears. This week in TechCrunch podcastland, the Equity team talked about how Y Combinator has evolved over the past few years, the Chain Reaction team “digging into the institutional embrace of blockchain by heavy financial powerhouses,” and the Found team all had “the greatest hits” of revisiting an interview with Figma founder Dylan Field from earlier this year.

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