Vizio users across the country reported difficulty using their smart televisions Saturday morning, after outage-tracking service Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in complaints beginning around 10 a.m. Eastern time.

Downdetector’s official social media account flagged the surge in reports shortly after the issues began, posting under the hashtag “#VizioDown” and asking affected users to share how the disruption was impacting them. As of the most recent available information, Vizio had not issued a public statement confirming a company-wide outage or detailing its specific cause, though the company has a history of responding to similar disruptions affecting its SmartCast platform, which powers the interface and app functionality on Vizio’s connected televisions.

Users experiencing problems with Vizio devices have historically reported a range of specific symptoms during past SmartCast disruptions, including televisions displaying a persistent loading or spinning icon without ever fully booting into the smart interface, streaming apps failing to load or unexpectedly cutting off mid-broadcast, and difficulty logging into or accessing account-linked features. During a previous SmartCast outage, Vizio confirmed the disruption directly through its official social media account, telling affected customers at the time, “Currently, there is an outage impacting SmartCast TV. We’re working on this right now. You’ll still be able to use the quick buttons on the TV’s remote control and you can cast to the TV. We hope to have this resolved soon but we don’t have a timeframe.”

That kind of company acknowledgment has typically included practical guidance for customers looking for workarounds during an active SmartCast disruption. In past incidents, Vizio has noted that even when the smart interface itself becomes unavailable, physical quick-access buttons on the television’s remote control generally continue to function independently of the SmartCast software layer, allowing users to jump directly to preset streaming apps. Casting content to the television from a separate device, such as a smartphone or tablet, has also historically remained available as an alternative during outages affecting the smart TV’s built-in interface.

Downdetector, the platform used to track and aggregate Saturday morning’s complaints, monitors self-reported user issues across thousands of websites and connected services rather than directly accessing the internal systems of the companies it tracks. Owned by Ookla and launched in 2012, the service currently tracks more than 12,000 services internationally and maintains separate country-specific outage-tracking pages across 45 countries. Because Downdetector relies on aggregated, self-reported complaints rather than direct server-side monitoring, spikes in reported issues can sometimes reflect a genuine, widespread service disruption, while other spikes may instead result from more localized problems affecting specific devices, firmware versions, regions or internet service providers rather than a broader, company-wide outage.

Separate independent monitoring services checking Vizio’s website and related services around the same general timeframe reported mixed results, with some tools indicating the company’s main website was functioning normally while still noting that individual failures remained possible, consistent with the pattern of a disruption concentrated specifically in Vizio’s SmartCast television platform rather than its broader web presence.

Vizio, one of the largest sellers of smart televisions in the United States, has built its business model substantially around SmartCast, the proprietary operating system that powers the streaming and app functionality on its television lineup. The company also generates significant revenue through its Platform+ advertising and data business, which relies on SmartCast’s connectivity to deliver targeted advertising and content recommendations to users, meaning outages affecting the platform can disrupt both the viewing experience for customers and the underlying data and advertising infrastructure the company depends on for a meaningful share of its revenue.

For users experiencing difficulty with their Vizio televisions during the reported disruption, common troubleshooting steps recommended for smart TV connectivity issues include restarting the television by unplugging it from its power source for approximately 30 seconds before plugging it back in, verifying that the television’s Wi-Fi or ethernet connection is functioning properly by testing other connected devices on the same network, and checking for any available software updates once the device successfully reconnects. If the underlying disruption proves to be a service-side issue affecting Vizio’s SmartCast servers rather than a problem specific to an individual user’s television or home network, however, these troubleshooting steps are unlikely to resolve the problem until the company restores normal service on its end.

As of the most recent available information, Vizio had not provided a public timeline for resolving Saturday’s reported issues, and the company had not responded publicly to the elevated volume of complaints registered through Downdetector throughout the morning. Users continuing to experience problems with their Vizio televisions or the SmartCast platform are encouraged to monitor the company’s official social media channels for updates, given the absence of confirmed information directly from Vizio as of Saturday morning.

NEW DELHI: Fitch on Friday said it has withdrawn the ratings on Reliance Capital as the company has decided to stop participating in the agency’s rating process.

“The ratings have been withdrawn as Reliance Capital has chosen to stop participating in the rating process. Therefore, Fitch will no longer have sufficient information to provide ratings or analytical coverage of Reliance Capital,” Fitch Ratings said in a statement.

A leading financial services company Reliance Capital, an Anil Ambani group firm, has interests in diverse areas including asset management, mutual funds, portfolio management services, life and general insurance.

Google pulled a new artificial intelligence image-generation feature from Google Earth on Friday, just one day after launching it globally, after users demonstrated that the tool could be used to fabricate realistic-looking satellite-style imagery superimposed over real, named locations.

The feature, called “Create Image,” used Google’s Nano Banana 2 model, technically known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Image, to generate AI images grounded in actual satellite, aerial and 3D terrain data for any location a user selected within Google Earth’s web platform. Google framed the launch as a creative tool that could let users visualize how a historical landmark once looked, brainstorm urban planning concepts for a vacant lot, or preview real estate development ideas before construction began, distinguishing it from general-purpose AI image generators that start only from a blank text prompt rather than a real, mapped location.

The feature rolled out globally at no additional charge on Thursday, available exclusively through Google Earth’s web version at earth.google.com rather than through the mobile apps, which together account for more than 500 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone. Generated images were watermarked, both visibly and with an embedded invisible marker, and could only be saved within Google Earth projects, without the ability to be directly exported or shared outside the platform, according to Google’s developer documentation.

Those safeguards proved insufficient to prevent misuse once the tool became widely accessible. Digital investigator Henk van Ess demonstrated the feature’s potential for generating misleading content by producing images depicting refugees near the Mexican border, a nuclear facility in Iran, a fatal crash scene in Amsterdam, and a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza, all superimposed onto real, identifiable map locations within Google Earth’s interface.

The specific interaction model underlying the tool, allowing users to type a text description and have the resulting AI-generated image dropped directly onto a real satellite map location, drew particularly sharp criticism given Google Earth’s established reputation as a widely trusted source of geospatial reference imagery. Journalists routinely use the platform to geolocate conflict footage and verify the authenticity of on-the-ground reporting, human rights investigators use it to corroborate witness accounts of specific events, and academics rely on it as a baseline dataset for geographic and historical research. Layering a generative AI tool directly inside that same interface effectively collapsed the visual distinction between genuine, recorded satellite imagery and synthetic, AI-fabricated imagery within a single trusted platform, a concern critics raised almost immediately after the feature’s rollout.

Google confirmed it was rolling back the feature after becoming aware of screenshots showing generated imagery that the company said appeared to violate its policies. The company said it plans to rebuild the tool with stronger safeguards before any future relaunch, though it has not provided a specific timeline for when a revised version might become available again.

Prior to the rollback, Google had highlighted a range of intended use cases for the tool through its official launch materials, including visualizing historical scenes at real-world landmarks, generating easy-to-read historical infographics tied to specific locations, and exploring conceptual redesigns of public spaces or vacant lots. The company positioned the feature as adding a new creative layer to Google Earth, transforming the platform from a tool that primarily shows users the world as it currently exists into one that also lets them imagine what a given location could become in the future.

Nano Banana 2 sits within a broader family of Google image-generation models of varying capability tiers. It occupies a mid-tier position between the lighter-weight Nano Banana 2 Lite, which can generate standalone images in roughly four seconds through Google’s developer API at a cost of $0.034 per image, and the more capable Nano Banana Pro, which Google has reserved for more complex, professional-grade image rendering tasks.

The rapid rollback comes just days after Google had separately touted the growing role of artificial intelligence within its broader product ecosystem, crediting AI tools with helping identify and fix significantly more bugs within its Chrome browser in June than the company had resolved across the prior two years combined, according to reporting on the company’s recent AI-related announcements.

The Google Earth incident adds to a broader, ongoing debate across the technology industry about how to responsibly deploy increasingly capable generative AI image tools within platforms that carry an established reputation for accuracy and trustworthiness. Watermarking and export restrictions, the two primary safeguards Google built into the initial version of the Nano Banana 2 Earth integration, proved insufficient on their own to prevent the creation of convincing, potentially misleading fabricated imagery tied to real, sensitive locations, underscoring the difficulty technology companies continue to face in balancing creative AI features against the risk of enabling visual misinformation.

With the feature now pulled less than 24 hours after its global debut, Google has not specified what additional guardrails it intends to implement before considering a future relaunch, leaving open questions about whether the underlying tension between creative flexibility and misinformation risk can be fully resolved for a feature integrated directly into one of the world’s most widely used and trusted geospatial reference platforms.

This article was written by

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The stocks of DB Realty and Unitech rose after top executives of these companies were granted bail in the 2G scam case. The DB Realty stock has risen 40%, while Unitech gained 4%. However, some of the intrinsic problems which plague these companies, and uncertainty over the outcome of the 2G scam case may prevent any major appreciation in the stock.

Scrapping of projects involving the government, delayed execution and difficulty in securing approvals for new projects – DB Realty has seen it all. The company did not launch any new projects in the September quarter and sold around 50-75% of its existing seven projects. Even the analyst community has washed its hands of the stock with most brokerages discontinuing their coverage on the stock.

The company’s net sales for the first half year ended September are down by 36%, while its net profit dropped by 76% during the same period. However, the company is extinguishing its debt by selling non-core assets.

At the end of the September quarter, the company managed to reduce its debt from Rs600 crore a year ago to Rs 230 crore. It is sitting on a substantial pileup of TDR (transfer of development rights), which can be realised to further boost cash flows of the company. However, the outcome of the 2G scam case on its promoters will weigh heavily on the business prospects of the company which has its projects predominantly in Mumbai.

Unitech is the second big real estate company to be impacted because of the alleged involvement of its top deck in the 2G scam. Besides the problems associated with all real estate companies, there are other challenges.

For instance, the company was at the receiving end of shareholders’ ire at its annual general meeting as they refused to approve a resolution to pay dividend on equity shares for the fiscal 2011. The company’s net sales and earnings have dropped by 17% and 45% respectively for the first half of this fiscal.
However, the business model continues to remain strong. Unitech has a presence in the affordable and mid-income housing segment which enables it to generate cash flows. It has been launching new projects, although the scale of execution is slow. Despite lower revenue recognition, it has managed to lower its debt through internal cash accruals.

It has an outstanding net debt of Rs 5,144 crore and a land bank of close to 7,000 acres with an average cost of acquisition of land of around Rs 250 per square feet. Despite strong fundamentals, the loss of credibility and uncertainty over the 2G probe will restrict any major upside in the stock. The stock continues to trade at a significant discount to its land value that analysts estimate to be at Rs 60.

MUMBAI: Alfa Laval (India), a subsidiary of Sweden-based Alfa Laval Corporate AB, today said its parent firm has raised the delisting offer price to Rs 2,850 a share.

In a filing with the BSE, Alfa Laval India said its parent company increased the delisting offer price after “considering the prevailing market conditions and with a view to reward shareholders”.

However, the company further said, “Offer price should in no way be construed as a ceiling or maximum price for the purpose of the reverse book-building process and the public shareholders are free to tender their equity shares at any price higher than the indicative offer price.”

Reacting to the news, the company’s shares surged by 14.40 per cent to close at Rs 2,710.85 a piece on the BSE. In the intra-day trade, the stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 2,742.

The entity that offers heat transfer, separation and fluid handling technologies would be delisted from the BSE and the National Stock Exchange.

In September 2011, the company’s board had accepted the delisting proposal and in October fixed a floor price of Rs 2,045 a share to buy out the outstanding public float.
Alfa Laval (India) had said the promoter firm would make a delisting offer to acquire up to 2,040,202 shares, accounting for 11.23 per cent stake in the domestic entity.

At present, the promoter company holds 88.77 per cent stake in Alfa Laval (India).