Vodafone Australia was hit by a nationwide outage on Friday that lasted from around 11am to after 9pm Eastern time. Vodafone acknowledged both calls and data were being affected on its 4G network, though no specific description of what went wrong has been offered yet.

Google has accidentally revealed an internal project that allowed it to use data from past ad purchases on its advertising platforms to win bids when buying ads for itself. In documents submitted as part of an anti-trust case against Google in Texas, an unredacted document revealed Project Bernanke helped the company make $230M in 2013 by putting its own tools at an advantage over others through access to its own internal data. Control of both selling and buying within its dominant ad platform is seen as a major aspect of Google's monopoly power in the search advertising market.

In the legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, internal emails reveal that senior Apple Executive Phil Schiller believed releasing Apple's iMessage app for Android would hurt the company. Epic aims to build a picture of a monopolistic Apple and argues this means it is a known point of 'lock in' for users. In the US, apps like WhatsApp have not caught on as widely as elsewhere in the world so many more Apple users do stay within the iMessage app.

A study by researchers at University of Southern California has found that job advertisements appearing on Facebook have a gender bias. Their analysis showed Facebook was using existing skews in gendering of job types and company demographics to show ads on a gender skewed basis. A similar test of LinkedIn found that the business-focused social network was actively ensuring its job ads were displayed with no such gender skew.

In Earth science, researchers from Southern Cross University have found a methane-eating bacteria in Australian paperbark trees that may have potential for cutting down greenhouse gases. The discovery found the microbes are abundant and mitigated a third of methane emissions from paperbark – a result of new research into methane emissions caused by trees.

In the oceans, researchers are finding more species of fish are migrating away from the equators as seas grow too hot. The problem could see mass extinctions in ocean environments as diversity is reduced in equatorial regions while the growth in diversity elsewhere will include invasive actions and see other species reduce in numbers or die off. The study suggests that, apart from the importance of climate change mitigation, changes to fishing and mining is critical to help manage these problems.

In games, Bloomberg has reported that Sony is focusing its PlayStation developers on blockbuster games only at the expense of riskier, quirkier projects. The report says there will be no Days Gone sequel, while another studio is working on a full remake of The Last Of Us just 8 years after the original and less than three years since the release of the Remastered version for PS4.

And finally, Pentanet GG won the inaugural LCO series defeating Peace 3-1. The team will represent the Australian region at the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational in Reykjavik, Iceland starting May 6. 

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