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Planes at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport were briefly left flying blind overnight as the airport experienced another radar outage – the second incident in less than two weeks. The most recent radar outage, first reported by ABC news, occurred just before 4 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday and lasted for a minute and a half. “There was a telecommunications outage that impacted communications and radar display at Philadelphia TRACON Area C, which guides aircraft in and out of Newark Liberty International Airport airspace,” an Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson confirmed in a statement provided to Fast Company. Why New York area planes are…

When internet services platform Cloudflare suffered an outage in November, it took a big chunk of the online world down with it. Major platforms like ChatGPT, X, and Canva became unreachable. So did digital services offered by countless banks, retailers, and many other businesses. During the six-hour meltdown, as many as 2.4 billion users could have felt the impact. Software outages like this have always been and always will be part of online life. But today our systems are more interconnected than ever, so a single failure can ripple outward. AI only amplifies that risk. Yet, too many companies still lack protection against such disasters. In an era when ou…

Fast Company is delighted to make this article available to any student for free. Please request a copy by email. I was sitting on the steps of Duke Chapel at 2 a.m. in December 2023, the Gothic towers looming above me, a 210-foot reminder of everything I was about to walk away from. My phone was exploding with notifications: Y Combinator had just accepted us. ChatGPT had hit 100 million users in two months—faster than TikTok, faster than Instagram, faster than anything in human history. And I was about to break my single mother’s heart. The chapel bells rang twice, echoing across the empty quad. In six hours, I’d be dropping out of one of America’s best univ…

Today (Monday, May 5, 2025) is Cinco de Mayo. The day celebrates the May 5, 1862, victory of Mexico against France in the Battle of Puebla. However, while Cinco de Mayo celebrates an important event in Mexican history, the day is widely observed in communities across America and is now frequently one used to celebrate Mexican-American culture in the United States. Many brands in America—especially restaurant chains—like to participate in Cinco de Mayo by offering deals and freebies to customers. This is especially true of restaurants that serve Mexican or Mexican-American food. Here are some deals to be had today if you are up for celebrating Cinco de Mayo with your t…

When film cameras were invented, people didn’t become filmmakers overnight. We pointed cameras at theater stages, digitizing what already existed. It took us a while to reimagine what film cameras could unlock. The real opportunity wasn’t recording theater plays. It was stepping outside and inventing cinema. That’s where many nonprofits are with AI today. Most still layer it on top of existing processes, not because they don’t care about innovation, but because they lack both the frameworks to identify the right use cases and the capacity to act on them. True innovation starts when organizations have the space, skills, and confidence to reimagine how impact itse…

A startup called Orion is ready to take on America’s sleep loss epidemic with a new, AI-enabled mattress cover that can adjust its temperature throughout the night to maximize comfort and rest. Cofounder and CEO Harry Gestetner previously cofounded the startup Fanfix, which helped Gen Z content creators build paid subscription programs. After the company sold to SuperOrdinary for a reported $65 million, Gestetner says he became interested in sleep and its well-documented links to health and longevity. “Every longevity expert tells you that sleep is the cornerstone of longevity,” he says. Gestetner found that most sleep and fitness trackers could detect bad …

For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool. That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as na…

For its 50th anniversary, Zara has partnered with 50 designers and creators for a collection you might not expect from a fast-fashion mall brand. The Spanish fashion retailer unveiled its 50th anniversary collection at Paris Fashion Week with collaborators that include photographer Annie Leibovitz, supermodel Cindy Crawford, stage designer Es Devlin, and musician Robbie Williams. Available worldwide beginning Oct. 6, the collection does include plenty to wear (Leibovitz contributed a photo for a t-shirt), but what stands out most are the non-apparel items. This is about a whole lot more than clothes. Devlin, whose build stages for artists like Adele, Beyoncé, …

The 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report depicts a dystopian future where a specialized police unit is tasked with arresting people for crimes they have not yet committed. Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the drama revolves around “PreCrime”—a system informed by a trio of psychics, or “precogs,” who anticipate future homicides, allowing police officers to intervene and prevent would-be assailants from claiming their targets’ lives. The film probes at hefty ethical questions: How can someone be guilty of a crime they haven’t yet committed? And what happens when the system gets it wrong? While there is no such thing as an al…