On today's News Update podcast, we give you three stories that deal with Apple competitors Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Please note that the podcast will be on spring break until March 14.

• Facebook is testing a new feature that could make it easier to post your status to your News Feed: something called Voice Clips. It lets users record short audio clips that friends and family can then listen to.
• Amazon's Alexa digital assistant went mute for a while today after a data center issue caused a regional outage of Amazon Web Services
• Apple's wonderful accessibility features for the vision impaired and blind received a boost today from Microsoft with the Redmond, Washington company's new Soundscape app for iPhone