Microsoft said Saturday that clients of its Azure cloud platform might experience increased latency after multiple undersea cables were cut in the Red Sea, as reported in Bloomberg.

In a status update, the company said traffic going through the Middle East or ending in Asia or Europe had been affected. It did not say who had cut the cables or why.

“Undersea fiber cuts can take time to repair, as such we will continuously monitor, rebalance, and optimize routing to reduce customer impact in the meantime,” the status update said.

By Saturday evening, Microsoft said it was no longer detecting any Azure issues.

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Meta halted all hiring for its artificial intelligence division, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, and is even pausing movement between teams within the company. After confirming the hiring freeze, a Meta spokesperson told the newspaper it was “basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”

It’s all part of restructuring within the division, creating new teams to focus on different aspects of the business, the Journal reported. One is said to be working on superintelligence, while others are dedicated to products, infrastructure and long-term projects.

Meta did not respond to SFGATE’s request for confirmation and comment as of publication Friday.

A post on X Thursday from Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer, appeared to push against the reporting of the hiring freeze: “We are truly only investing more and more into Meta Superintelligence Labs as a company. Any reporting to the contrary of that is clearly mistaken,” he wrote.

The news comes just weeks after reports of Meta making eye-popping hiring efforts to acquire AI workers, including some pay packages that may have reached up to $100 million, according to Wired. Meta has been aggressively amping up its AI efforts in the past two years, even scooping up San Francisco data-labeling startup Scale AI this June for a reported $14.3 billion and taking select employees along with it. That’s in addition to luring 11 new hires from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, Bloomberg found.

This poaching could seem egregious, but it’s part of an overall war between tech companies fighting for the most highly coveted AI talent. It’s even been likened to sports trading in athletics, with one package reportedly valued at $1.5 billion.

This reveal, coupled with a warning about an “AI bubble” from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, caused tech stocks to tumble earlier this week. As of Friday, however, stocks have somewhat rebounded after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell indicated an interest rate cut could be coming.

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