Enlarge / Twitter's new X logo. (credit: Twitter )

Twitter has replaced its longtime bird logo with an X in order to fit owner Elon Musk's preferred aesthetic. Musk is famously a fan of the letter X, applying it to everything from his companies to his children's names.

The branding change comes about three months after Musk officially replaced Twitter the company with a successor firm called X Corp. Over the weekend, Musk wrote that "soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," and invited users to come up with a new logo. He also wrote that a tweet will now be called an "X," and noted that his X.com domain now redirects to Twitter.

Musk chose a logo offered by a Twitter user but wrote that it will probably be changed later and "certainly will be refined." The X logo was suggested yesterday by Sawyer Merritt, who initially said it had been used for a now-discontinued podcast about Musk .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Christopher Furlong )

Elon Musk's X Corp. is suing four unidentified data scrapers accused of "severely tax[ing]" Twitter's servers and degrading the social network's user experience. The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far, allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter" by "flooding Twitter's sign-up page with automated requests."

"The volume of these requests far exceeded what any single individual could send to a server in a given period and clearly indicated that these automated requests were aimed at scraping data from Twitter. These requests have severely taxed X Corp.'s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.'s customers," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit , which seeks damages of at least $1 million, was filed last week in Dallas County District Court and reported yesterday by the Dallas-based station WFAA. The defendants are four John Does. Twitter hopes to learn their true identities during discovery.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

Data shows that a sudden spike in interest in Meta's Threads—which surpassed 100 million signups in five days, Mark Zuckerberg boasted yesterday—has likely already put a tiny dent in Twitter's traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported .

The news comes after a tweet from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince went viral. In it, Prince shared a Cloudflare chart showing that since January, Twitter traffic—compared to other popular websites—has been "tanking."

During Threads' first two days online, Twitter traffic dropped by 5 percent compared to the same two days in the prior week, web analytics firm SimilarWeb reported. When measuring year over year, Twitter's traffic dropped by 11 percent.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Duncan Hull / Getty)

Elon Musk's X Corp. this week sued a law firm that Twitter hired last year after Musk tried to break their $44 billion merger agreement. Musk's lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court alleges that Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz overcharged Twitter when it collected $90 million—including $84.3 million on the same day Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

"This action for equitable relief arises out of an effort by Wachtell to fundamentally alter its fee arrangement as litigation counsel in the twilight of its representation of Twitter to obtain an improper bonus payment in violation of its fiduciary and ethical obligations to its client," claimed the lawsuit filed by X Corp., the successor company to Twitter. "Wachtell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries who had lost their motivation to act in Twitter's best interest pending its imminent sale to Elon Musk and his entities, X Holdings I, Inc. and X Holdings II, Inc."

When Musk tried to pull out of his commitment to buy Twitter, the company hired Wachtell in July 2022 to handle the lawsuit that eventually forced Musk to complete the merger. Musk finally honored the merger contract in October when it became clear that he would likely lose in court.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. (credit: Getty Images | AFP)

The proposed cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might never happen, but the tech titans may soon battle in a more civil arena. Musk's X Corp., the successor company to Twitter, yesterday threatened to sue Meta over alleged intellectual property violations in Meta's new Threads social network .

Musk's lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter on behalf of X Corp. to Meta CEO Zuckerberg. "Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched 'Threads' app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

The letter was revealed today in a Semafor article . "Competition is fine, cheating is not," Musk tweeted about the letter.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

In what might be another blow to the stability of Twitter's trust and safety efforts, the company has allegedly stopped paying for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which host tools that support the platform's safety measures, Platformer reported this weekend.

According to Platformer, Twitter relies on Google Cloud to host services "related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things." That contract is up for renewal at the end of this month after being negotiated and signed prior to Elon Musk's takeover. Since "at least" March, Twitter has been pushing to renegotiate the contract ahead of renewal—unsurprisingly seeking to lower costs, Platformer reported.

But now it's unclear if the companies will find agreeable new terms on time or if Musk already intends to cancel the contract. Platformer reported that Twitter is rushing to transition services off the Google Cloud Platform and seemingly plans to drop the contract amid failed negotiations.

Enlarge / Ev Williams, Twitter co-founder, delivers remarks at Web Summit in Altice Arena on November 8, 2018, in Lisbon, Portugal. (credit: Horacio Villalobos / Contributor | Corbis News )

Twitter co-founder Evan "Ev" Williams has broken his silence and joined other co-founders in expressing his dismay at how Elon Musk is running the platform.

In his first public remarks on Musk's leadership since Musk's Twitter takeover, Williams told Bloomberg's "The Circuit" yesterday that after Musk's purchase went through, he felt "sad."

Ever since, he hasn't been encouraged by developments at Twitter. The company's ongoing financial struggles include most recently recording a five-week period from April to May, where its advertising revenue dropped by 59 percent , compared to ad revenue at the same time last year.

Enlarge / Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (credit: Scott Olson / Staff | Getty Images North America )

Yesterday, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis became the first presidential hopeful to announce his campaign on Twitter Spaces, which Elon Musk had touted as a "smart move" for "any candidate" to "get the highest possible audience."

But instead of making sure that DeSantis' announcement was delivered to the broadest possible audience, Twitter glitched for nearly 30 minutes, causing more than half of DeSantis' initial 600,000-strong audience to ditch the audio session, briefly including DeSantis himself, The Washington Post reported . In the end, only 161,000 users heard DeSantis deliver his short speech, NBC News reported , with a total of approximately 300,000 users ultimately attending the audio-only event, which lasted more than an hour.

A screenshot widely shared from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" showed that the number represented fewer viewers than videos of US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got playing a game on Twitch, Buzzfeed got exploding a watermelon, and April the Giraffe got giving birth.

Enlarge / A fake AI-generated image of an "explosion" near the Pentagon that went viral on Twitter. (credit: Twitter)

On Monday, a tweeted AI-generated image suggesting a large explosion at the Pentagon led to brief confusion, which included a reported small drop in the stock market. It originated from a verified Twitter account named "Bloomberg Feed," unaffiliated with the well-known Bloomberg media company, and was quickly exposed as a hoax. However, before it was debunked, large accounts such as Russia Today had already spread the misinformation, The Washington Post reported .

The fake image depicted a large plume of black smoke alongside a building vaguely reminiscent of the Pentagon with the tweet "Large Explosion near The Pentagon Complex in Washington D.C. — Inital Report." Upon closer inspection, local authorities confirmed that the image was not an accurate representation of the Pentagon. Also, with blurry fence bars and building columns, it looks like a fairly sloppy AI-generated image created by a model like Stable Diffusion .

Before Twitter suspended the false Bloomberg account, it had tweeted 224,000 times and reached fewer than 1,000 followers, according to the Post, but it's unclear who ran it or the motives behind sharing the false image. In addition to Bloomberg Feed, other accounts that shared the false report include “Walter Bloomberg” and “Breaking Market News," both unaffiliated with the real Bloomberg organization.