Technology

On a cloudy Saturday afternoon in the southern US state of Texas, a pair of large metallic arms stretched out and caught a giant in midair as it descended from the sky.

At 124 metres (407ft) tall, SpaceX’s Starship is the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, intended for travel to the Moon and Mars. Yet 22 hours after its latest blast off into space, it made history on Earth while returning, as it slipped smoothly between mechanical “chopstick arms” above Launch Pad 2 at Starbase city in Texas.

Aerospace engineers across the globe have lauded the first-ever capture of the upper stage of a spaceship and welcomed the achievement, which signals that mega rockets could soon be fully reusable.

Here’s why the historic capture matters:

How did it work?

On Saturday, after orbiting Earth 14 times for 22.5 hours, SpaceX’s Starship emerged from thick clouds over its Starbase launch site, flipped itself to a vertical position and slowly descended into the arms on the ‘Mechazilla’ launch tower.

Like massive tweezers, the arms caught the upper stage of the spacecraft in midair, while its engines were still roaring.

The spacecraft then hooked onto the tower’s mechanical arms and shut off its engines.

The roaring sound was instantly replaced by loud cheers from watchers nearby – they had just seen for the first time in history the capture of a mega rocket.

“That was the missing link, the holy grail of spaceflight,” said SpaceX mission commentator Dan Huot. “We caught a Starship and now everything changes.”

“Congratulations to an incredible team at SpaceX!!!” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said.

NASA, which is paying billions of dollars for Starship to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade, also welcomed the achievement.

“It was almost magic,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X.

“Making more believers by the day…one step closer to [the moon],” he added.

Why was the capture tricky?

Spacecraft returning to Earth battle gravity and a range of atmospheric factors that are nearly impossible to perfectly predict or game.

Sputnik 1, the first-ever artificial satellite sent into space, burned up while returning to Earth.

Several manned spacecraft have been destroyed while re-entering the atmosphere, killing the astronauts on board.

In April 1967, the Soviet Union’s Soyuz 1 spacecraft re-entered the atmosphere successfully, but its parachutes failed to deploy properly. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died in the crash-landing near the Ural mountains. Decades later, NASA’s space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry from orbit, killing all seven astronauts on board.

In recent decades, space agencies and private firms have made major advances in safety. But many spacecraft are impossible to reuse after splashing down in the sea or on land.

Since October 2024, SpaceX has on three occasions successfully caught the boosters that propel shuttles, once they have run out of fuel and separated from the main rocket.

But until now, the main spacecraft has never been successfully caught in midair.

Soon after its return, Musk and his engineers inspected the spaceship and said that everything appeared to have worked well, including its vital heat shield.

“Ship 42 looks great!” Musk wrote on X, posting photos and videos from the launch tower.

While the capture was tricky, aerospace engineers said the upper stage catch is a big success for SpaceX.

Niharika Patel, Technical Programme Manager at Loft Orbital, a US-based space infrastructure company, told Al Jazeera that watching the catch happen was “magical.”

“Landing a rocket back on Earth is incredibly difficult and can itself be considered an engineering marvel. Now add the sheer size and weight of Starship to that equation,” she said, noting that this is also the first time the upper stage booster has been successfully caught.

“It requires incredible precision to ensure the vehicle reaches exactly the right position, withstands the extreme heat of atmospheric re-entry and executes highly controlled manoeuvres within a very tight window. And all of this happens without a pilot — it’s completely autonomous,” she added.

Why does it matter for space technology advances?

SpaceX has become dominant in the aerospace industry primarily because the company has been trying to slash the cost of space travel by launching reusable rocket technology and rapid, repeat engineering.

So far, its Falcon 9 rocket has launched 700 times since 2010, with its first stage being reusable and its second stage discarded into the sea.

With Starship, Musk has said he wants to create fully reusable flights that can also transport humans into space with minimum refurbishment.

“SpaceX has already significantly reduced the cost of getting to orbit through Falcon 9’s reusability. It’s super cheap and convenient to send satellites to low Earth orbit. Starship takes this a step further by being a much bigger craft and aiming for full reusability of both the booster and the upper stage,” Patel said.

She explained that a fully reusable vehicle can be rapidly refurbished and flown again, dramatically increasing frequency and reducing cost. So if Starship reaches this milestone, Patel said it would make access to space even more affordable and scalable, just as commercial aviation transformed travel by making aircraft reusable with quick turnaround times between flights.

“This is essential for the next era of space exploration, from deploying large satellite constellations and building space infrastructure to enabling sustained human exploration of the Moon and Mars,” Patel added.

Airlines are still scrambling to return operations to normal after the longest and only second nationwide stop of flights in the United States since the attacks of 9/11 in 2001.

More than 5,000 flights were cancelled in the US on Saturday after over 9,000 were scrapped a day earlier as the knock-on effects continued from Friday’s abrupt ground stop. The stoppage was halted after more than four hours on Friday night, but airports and carriers were still grappling with large backlogs and resulting delays.

The decision to suddenly ground all planes on Friday initially triggered speculation of a cyberattack.

But officials have since ruled that out and named the reason for the weekend disruptions as a routine replacement of the communications routers that connect the US air traffic control system.

Here’s everything we know about what went wrong:

What happened?

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop of flights at 3:54pm East Coast time (20:54 GMT) on Friday, citing a telecommunications outage affecting air route traffic control centres.

The outage caused thousands of flights to be cancelled or delayed across the US.

The ground stop was removed at 8:15pm on Friday (01:15 GMT on Saturday), but hundreds of flights were still delayed or cancelled that night, according to the aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Aircraft already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations and land during the ground stop while international flights were handled on a case-by-case basis with some allowed to depart despite the restrictions.

What caused the ground stop?

A routine upgrade was being carried out – maintenance work that ultimately overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the ground stop, US officials said.

L3Harris, a contractor, was replacing a section of the system’s old and discontinued copper wire with new fibre optic lines in a remote location on Friday afternoon, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday.

The router in that location then started overloading the air traffic control system, causing communications disruptions. When officials couldn’t locate the cause of the overload, they grounded flights nationwide.

“When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace,” Duffy said.

The transportation secretary said “contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment” caused the router to start flooding other ones.

“We had 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds,” he told reporters.

The issue affected communications at 17 of the FAA’s 22 en route centres.

The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), a union representing FAA safety employees, said the issue was isolated to two routers that were updated on Friday. An official told the Reuters news agency it was believed the routers were in Arkansas and Texas.

An FAA official said the agency conducted a safety assessment before the work. The union said PASS-represented technicians were not involved in the upgrades that led to the ground stop.

Ageing technology and equipment alongside a shortage of several thousand controllers have long been concerns plaguing the US air traffic control system.

Duffy on Friday called for $50bn in funding to upgrade these systems, up from his earlier request of $30bn after Congress approved $12.5bn last year.

So it wasn’t a cyberattack?

No.

White House officials had convened an emergency meeting in the Situation Room on Friday amid concerns that the incident was due to a cyberattack. But the US government has since said it did not believe that was the cause.

“Once we were able to isolate the work being done at this location, all of our systems came back online,” Duffy said. “So we don’t believe this was cyber at all.”

The FAA chief reiterated that view at Saturday’s news conference.

“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.

Who has been named responsible for the incident?

L3Harris, a US-based aerospace and defence company, is the contractor behind the systems upgrade, the US Department of Transportation said.

Three-fourths of the company’s revenue comes from US government contracts, largely from the military, The New York Times reported.

“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it … installator error from L3Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said. “We haven’t determined what the fault was.”

Duffy added that L3Harris, which he said had performed decades of work for the FAA, “didn’t meet the moment”.

“They own this network. They’re our prime contractor. I can’t go somewhere else. They own it,” he said. “Frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”

In response to Duffy’s allegations, L3Harris told Al Jazeera it has been working “in close coordination with the FAA” and safety and reliability are its “highest priorities”.

“We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the November 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel,” a spokesperson for the company said.

“L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travellers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”

L3Harris said it has been “modernising” the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in “close coordination” with the FAA.

It added that it has completed more than 70 percent of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fibre optic system.

The FAA said it was doing additional testing with L3Harris to see if there are any further risks.

When will flights in the US be back to normal?

Bedford, the head of the FAA, cautioned that it could take time.

“We have crews and aircraft that are out of position for 12,000 flights that were lost,” Bedford said. “These crews, pilots and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules.”

He stated that he thinks “the worst is behind us”.

Duffy said airlines were expected to restore their full schedules by Sunday night.

Airlines have issued travel waivers for passengers affected to rebook flights for later dates at no cost.

Tens of thousands of people remain stranded in airports across the country while others have been left to pay surge prices for hotels and rental cars as airlines scramble to resume flights.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lifted a nationwide ground stop imposed on Friday that halted departing flights, an order it issued citing “extraordinary circumstances and reasons for safety”.

The halt, which grounded thousands of flights across the country, was lifted on Friday evening.

This was the third nationwide ground stop of all departures since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“Everybody’s safe,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, adding that this was not “another 9/11”.

Here is what we know:

What happened?

The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop at 3:54pm Eastern Time (20:54 GMT) on Friday due to a telecommunications outage affecting air route traffic control centres, which handle flights travelling across the country.

The FAA confirmed that the nationwide ground stop had been lifted.

US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said airspace reopened at 8:15pm ET (01:15 GMT on Saturday), after more than four hours of disruption.

“We’ve opened up the airspace,” Duffy said, warning that flights would not resume immediately.

“It’s going to be slow,” he added, urging passengers to check with their airlines.

Duffy said flights would resume depending on the availability of pilots and flight attendants, with authorities trying to get as many flights moving as possible on Friday night.

Aviation analytics firm Cirium said that after 4pm ET (21:00 GMT) on Friday, about 11,000 flights carrying more than 1.5 million passengers were still scheduled to depart from US airports.

By 7:05pm ET (00:05 GMT on Saturday), at least 827 flights had been diverted, according to Cirium. Of those, 670 returned to their departure airports, while 157 were diverted elsewhere.

Aircraft already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations and land during the ground stop.

During the ground stop, international flights were handled on a case-by-case basis, with some allowed to depart despite the restrictions.

How many flights were affected?

More than 4,700 flights were cancelled and 10,000 delayed on Friday, while another 700 had already been cancelled for Saturday, according to FlightRadar24.

Aviation analysts said it could take days for airlines to restore their schedules.

Reporting from Los Angeles international airport, Al Jazeera’s John Hendren spoke to passenger Nicholas Erdodi, who travelled from New Zealand and was trying to reach Chicago for a conference.

Erdodi said he had been travelling for 16 to 18 hours before spending another six hours at the airport, where passengers had been forced to leave their plane.

“The challenge is you cannot ask anyone here what to do,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Lack of information is what bothers me, I mean, and not to mention find the hotel for the night, not to mention all the cost.”

Erdodi said he had been rebooked but remained uncertain whether his next flight would depart.

“I work in tech, I understand what could be going on, but someone needs to tell us,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if someone tells us that we don’t know what’s happening, but please just let us know what’s going on,” he added.

What does a nationwide ground stop mean?

A nationwide ground stop temporarily requires departing aircraft to remain on the ground until cleared to take off.

Flights in the air are generally allowed to continue to their destination, but new departures are on strict orders to stay grounded.

The measure is intended to stop any further aircraft from entering the airspace as the authorities deal with the safety issues.

What caused the FAA nationwide ground stop?

The FAA said the ground stop was caused by a telecommunications outage affecting air traffic control systems.

Duffy said the outage was caused by switches and routers that became overloaded with data and went down, adding that the incident did not involve a total loss of communications or radar capabilities.

Todd Curtis, an aviation safety expert and chief executive of AirSafe.com, told Al Jazeera that the failures appeared to be concentrated in the country’s air route traffic control centres.

“There are 21 across the United States, one in Alaska and the other 20 in the lower 48,” he said.

“These are the folks who handle the aircraft that are transiting from one part of the country to the other, and they rely on multiple handoffs between controllers.”

Speaking before Duffy provided further details, Ron Bartsch, a professor of international aviation law at the University of the South Pacific, raised questions about the apparent failure of backup systems.

“The whole aviation community is based on redundancy,” he told Al Jazeera.

“So the fact that a redundant system hasn’t kicked in immediately just raises more questions than what we’ve seen answers to at this stage.”

Mullin said that there was no cyberattack linked to the nationwide ground stop and that the public was never in danger.

Duffy acknowledged that tens of thousands of travellers had been stranded and called for $50bn in upgrades to the nation’s air traffic control system.

When will US flights return to normal?

Duffy said it will “take us some time to get back to capacity”, but he expected operations to be “back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving”.

The Thanksgiving travel period, which begins in less than two weeks, is usually one of the busiest times of the year for air travel in the US.

Aviation safety expert Curtis also warned that the disruption could continue affecting passengers even after the technical problems were resolved.

“If it’s fully resolved, it would take more than a day to get back to normal, to reschedule aircraft,” he told Al Jazeera.

He explained that many airlines operate interconnected networks, meaning passengers often have to change planes at major hubs.

“So there could be a bit of a hassle on the part of the airlines trying to figure out how to get everyone to where they have to go,” he said.

Passengers have been advised to check their flight status directly with their airlines, as delays and cancellations might continue.

Jensen Huang, tech superstar, and now former chief executive of Nvidia, is due to appear before the United States Congress.

He has admitted to having an affair with a woman accused of having links to Chinese intelligence.

Nvidia says no company data has been compromised and there were no breaches of national security. But the FBI and the Department of Justice have launched investigations.

Could this damage the US chip-manufacturing industry?

And how will the US deal with potential spying at the highest levels of one of the world’s most valuable companies?

Presenter: Per Nyberg

Guests:

Paulo Carvao – Research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, specialising in AI and technology policy

Aya Ibrahim – Senior fellow for economic and national security at the AI Now Institute

Einar Tangen – Senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a specialist in China-US relations

Microsoft says servers unexpectedly went offline, disrupting Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and other services.

Thousands of Microsoft users reported trouble accessing their email and connecting to work apps after a widespread outage hit Outlook and other services on Thursday.

Reports of problems with Outlook, the company’s email client, climbed to about 130,000 on the outage tracking site Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT), with some users saying emails weren’t being sent or received, while others couldn’t open their inboxes.

By just before 3pm (20:00 GMT), that figure had fallen to about 77,000.

Users also reported having trouble accessing Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, along with other Microsoft 365 services. The company said the issues could impact users in any region.

Microsoft said on X that servers were unavailable and failing automatic health checks, putting pressure on those still operating. It said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute traffic that was elevated on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services to bring them back online.

“We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said.

Microsoft did not state when it expected services to be fully restored.

United States President Donald Trump travels to the Chinese city of Shenzhen next week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, where he is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The trip comes as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s outgoing chief executive and one of Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley, faces mounting scrutiny over his relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. China has denied the allegations.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced that Huang would step down as chief executive.

Huang accompanied Trump on his May visit to Beijing.

His presence mattered for Nvidia, which has struggled to secure approval to sell its H200 AI chips in China. Now, his place in the next delegation is in doubt.

So could Trump’s closeness to Huang push his administration towards a tougher line on China? Here’s what you need to know:

How did Huang shape the US-China chip thaw?

As founder and CEO of Nvidia, Huang pushed Washington to ease restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to China, arguing that wider use of US technology would help Washington hold onto its lead in AI development.

In December 2025, Trump did approve sales of the H200, Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, to China, with 25 percent of proceeds to be paid to the US government.

He did so despite opposition from China hawks in both parties.

Huang was a surprise late addition to Trump’s delegation to Beijing in May, in hopes of unlocking stalled H200 sales. Despite Trump’s decision to allow the sales, shipments were low because of slow import approvals from the Chinese government in a bid to support domestic chipmakers.

No breakthrough was announced.

Trump has stood by Huang throughout his recent personal scandal, calling him an “honourable guy”.

Will the Nvidia scandal prompt Trump to take a tougher stance with China?

Not immediately.

Huang’s removal from Nvidia’s board and the scandal leading up to that are unlikely to significantly affect relations between Washington and Beijing, which Steve Okun, a Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera is “a stalemate at best”.

Instead, if the US continues to impose restrictions on AI product sales to China, AI diversion and diffusion – how products are traded around the world both formally and informally – would be much more likely to cause tension between the two nations.

Gabriel Wildau, managing director at the advisory firm Teneo, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that Trump “shows no sign that he intends to disrupt the current US-China rapprochement”.

But he warned that the president “may face new pressure from Congress and hawkish voices inside his administration”.

Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said Trump “would not seem to have a coherent China policy and therefore his position in the upcoming talks in Shenzhen is hard to predict”.

Huang’s personal affairs “will be of little relevance” to China-US relations, he told Al Jazeera.

Where is the pressure to be tougher with China coming from?

Mostly from Congress, where control of both houses will pass to the Democrats in January.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said a tough US line on AI and China was not Trump’s alone, calling it “one of the rare political consensuses domestically across the aisle”.

Trump, he said, “will do whatever he can to protect his contribution and legacy on this matter”.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller to preserve all records on Nvidia’s chip exports to China.

“This incident raises significant concerns about the federal government’s ability to effectively enforce our export controls and protect our national security,” the senators wrote.

The news website Axios reported that Lutnick had held up a planned crackdown on firms suspected of funnelling Nvidia chips to China.

Meanwhile, procurement notices seen by the AFP news agency show that a Chinese university linked to the country’s defence establishment bought Nvidia H200 chips through a third party in September and October.

How has China responded?

Beijing has rejected the spy claims and accused Washington of using them as cover to impose stronger restrictions and semiconductor export controls on China.

“The US side should stop fabricating such ‘spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing a technological blockade,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday.

But Mao also said China is willing to work with the US to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders.

Omdia’s Su said China “has no interest in not engaging with Trump, given substantial interest in Nvidia graphics processing units”.

Chinese chipmakers may also gain from better access to US technology.

Shares in Moore Threads, MetaX and Cambricon, China’s leading makers of graphics processors, jumped nearly 10 percent on Thursday.

What happens after Shenzhen?

Holz, the Chinese economy expert, noted that the use of advanced Nvidia chips in Singapore data centres to serve customers in mainland China was “not new information”.

Still, Okun expects the pressure to build next year.

He said Congress could pass the Remote Access Security Act, aimed at stopping Chinese firms from reaching advanced chips through the cloud.

The Department of Commerce, he added, could put export controls on Megaspeed or require licences for advanced chips sent to countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

If that happens, it will strain the US-China relationship in 2027, he said, adding “but that’s not going to happen next week”.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Nvidia loses more than $600bn in market value as CEO Jensen Huang steps down amid espionage and affair allegations.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stepped down from the company following his reported affairs with a suspected Chinese spy and an Nvidia executive.

The $4.2 trillion tech giant has lost more than $600bn in market value this week as Huang’s scandals rocked the company, which supplies most of the chips powering advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The stock slid more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday.

The company appointed Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, as interim CEO on Thursday.

Nvidia’s board met on Wednesday night to discuss ousting Huang, whose relationship with the alleged Chinese spy triggered investigations by the FBI, the United States Congress and the California-based tech giant. Nvidia is also facing a shareholder class-action lawsuit.

The alleged Chinese intelligence asset, Alice Huang, is a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, Nvidia’s primary business partner in Southeast Asia. Founded in 2023, Megaspeed has been investigated over whether it helped Chinese companies access its $4.8bn stock of powerful Nvidia chips.

The affair has raised national security concerns in the US, which restricts chip sales to China over concerns that the Chinese military, intelligence agencies or companies could use the advanced technology.

Huang, 63, is Nvidia’s co-founder, president and CEO. A close ally of United States President Donald Trump, he has pushed to ease US restrictions on chip exports to China. Trump said earlier this week that Huang told him he had “absolutely no idea” that he was in a relationship with an intelligence operative.

Huang owns about 3.6 percent of Nvidia’s stock, making him one of the richest people in the world. He is a powerful figure in the AI industry, which has driven record stock market and wider economic gains.

Nvidia’s board, which hired a law firm to investigate the affair with Alice Huang, met to decide Huang’s fate on Wednesday shortly after the New York Times reported that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with a Nvidia vice president who reports to him.

Nvidia’s stock has tumbled since the scandal erupted, falling to a 14-year low, the Reuters news agency reported.

New Delhi, India – India has exempted an Israeli phone-hacking company from New Delhi’s own rules, allowing it to sell phone-extraction products and surveillance technology to government agencies and sparking concerns and criticism from rights groups and activists.

An investigation by the digital-rights group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) found Indian Home Minister Amit Shah, a close confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, signed off on exemptions from “make in India” procurement rules, clearing the way for government forensic institutions to buy at least 422 items of foreign technology, including products made by the Israeli firm Cellebrite.

Modi’s federal government and state governments ruled by his Bharatiya Janata Party are not the only ones who bought this Israeli technology. States governed by the opposition Indian National Congress party, including Himachal Pradesh, Keralam and Karnataka, also purchased similar phone-extraction and cloning tools.

A review of documents revealed that India’s expansive surveillance capabilities extend far beyond just cloning phones and extracting data without passwords to accessing cloud-based data from social media platforms – such as Instagram, X and Tinder – as well as data from connected devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home.

Experts argued that India’s current laws offer no guardrails against overreaching surveillance and the data extractions happen in a legal grey zone.

“It is clear that there is an expansion of India’s surveillance capabilities and it is becoming both wider and deeper,” said Vrinda Bhandari, a lawyer in the Supreme Court who works on digital rights and privacy issues.

“It’s now easier to conduct mass surveillance rather than targeted, specific surveillance and also possible to do more intrusive surveillance,” she told Al Jazeera. “[Today,] surveillance gives you a richer picture of an individual’s life.”

The IFF reviewed a letter also seen by Al Jazeera from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs dated January 7 in which Shah signed off on a wide-ranging, one-year waiver of “make in India” rules to clear a path for buying at least 422 forensic items.

Under “make in India” procurement rules, preference must be given to eligible Indian manufacturers over foreign suppliers in awarding government contracts. However, the rules allow exemptions with the approval of the minister in charge of the procuring department.

Another letter by the ministry dated January 20 showed Shah permitted the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to buy Israeli company Cellebrite’s Premium Tool on a three-year licence for about 50 million rupees ($529,947).

In specifications demanded by the government that were revealed in a review of tender bids, “solution” software must be capable of using login tokens recovered from seized phones or computers to access more than 100 cloud services. Login tokens are in effect digital keys that keep users signed in to online accounts.

Although an exemption for a company does not confirm whether a certain product was purchased by any government agency, it points to the range of forensic capabilities that opened up for procurement by Indian agencies.

From the 422-item exemption list, the IFF identified 118 items under digital and multimedia forensics, including Israeli company Cellebrite’s Pathfinder, Inseyets On-Prem Pro and Inseyets Offline.

Cellebrite’s tools have been used against journalists and activists in countries like Serbia, Jordan, Kenya and Russia.

Other products included tools from foreign digital-forensics companies like Magnet, MSAB, Oxygen Forensics and Belkasoft as well as software for open-source intelligence, dark-web monitoring and cryptocurrency investigations.

Al Jazeera reviewed a request for a bid proposal by the Delhi Police for software for its National Cyber Forensic Laboratory, which comes under the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, an initiative of the Home Ministry.

Consider the capabilities the police department was seeking in its request: software that bypasses passwords on Apple’s macOS, Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems; recovers internet activity, browser histories, deleted files and identifies traces of VPNs; bypasses screen locks; performs full file system extractions; decrypts backups; and extracts information from messaging applications.

The Delhi Police demanded another “all-in-one” system to access more than 100 cloud services, including Google, Apple, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Discord and dating platforms such as Tinder, Grindr and OkCupid or platforms like Slack and OnlyFans using account credentials or login tokens recovered from devices. Its specifications also sought the extraction of data from drones, wearable devices and devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

Al Jazeera reached out to officials at the NIA, the Home Ministry and home departments of opposition-ruled states of Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Keralam for comments. The Delhi Police reports to Shah’s mInistry.

None of them had responded to Al Jazeera by the time of publication.

‘How did they get inside my phone?’

For some, the lack of transparency in the surveillance capabilities of India’s security agencies is not just a theoretical concern.

Last month, when Modi’s government faced street protests demanding the election chief resign, popular YouTuber Dhruv Rathee, a Modi critic, landed in New Delhi to participate in the demonstrations.

On the morning of the protest, he was detained by Delhi Police while still at home. His phone was taken from him. Speaking on a podcast later, Rathee said he believed police had tried to clone his iPhone using Israeli company Cellebrite’s tools but the attempt may have failed because his device was running a newer version of the iOS operating system than what the tool was capable of tricking.

Al Jazeera could not verify Rathee’s account, but Rathee is not alone in this suspicion.

Mohammad Aslam Hussain, a reporter with the newspaper Siasat Daily, told Al Jazeera that he was detained with a cameraperson on October 10 in New Delhi and his phone was confiscated at the scene.

“When I got my device later in the evening, all recorded footage of our reporting had been selectively deleted from the device,” Hussain said. The reporter uses Samsung’s Android-operated Galaxy S24 secured with a pattern lock and fingerprint authentication.

Hussain added that he cannot say conclusively what tools the police used to bypass his phone’s authentication requirement. “But it raises several questions with no one willing to respond to them,” he added. “How did they get inside my phone?”

The Indian government has faced accusations that it has used sophisticated spyware against journalists, activists, lawyers and political opponents during Modi’s years in power.

In 2019, WhatsApp disclosed that the Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, had been used to target Indian journalists and human rights defenders. Forensic examinations by Amnesty International later confirmed Pegasus infections on the phones of journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Anand Mangnale. The government has denied allegations of unauthorised surveillance.

Bhandari told Al Jazeera that another problem in holding overarching surveillance to account is identifying the affected party. Often, she pointed out, the person placed under surveillance “does not know about it, so what does one do?”

‘Friction for surveillance’?

The central legal gap identified by digital rights group IFF is that India has no statute or protocol that specifically authorises or regulates the forced unlocking and full extraction of data from a mobile phone seized by law enforcement agencies.

Existing seizure powers under criminal law do not explicitly address bypassing passcodes, copying an entire file system, harvesting login tokens to access cloud accounts or establishing rules for the retention and deletion of extracted data.

The Supreme Court in a 2017 judgement recognised privacy as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. The judgement established that any state intrusion into privacy must have a legal basis, pursue a legitimate state aim and be proportionate to that aim.

Bhandari told Al Jazeera that when the government agencies “deploy these capabilities without any proper meaningful oversight, the net of surveillance is cast wider and deeper and a lot more people are affected without either legislative, parliamentary or judicial oversight”.

Bhandari noted that while some countries like the United Kingdom or Germany “have some element of either parliamentary oversight or judicial oversight, India only has an internal review mechanism in executive oversight”.

“The whole point of having any oversight is to create a friction for surveillance,” she said, “so that it’s not easy for the government to just target everybody.”

“The current legal framework fails in this safeguard,” Bhandari said.

United States lawmakers are pushing for answers from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang amid growing concerns over whether an affair he had compromised national security.

Huang, 63, has admitted to having extramarital relations during his time leading Nvidia, a major US tech firm. Media reports indicate the woman involved was Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based tech company Megaspeed who is accused of working for Chinese intelligence.

As the scandal continues to grip Washington, Republican leaders of three committees in the House of Representatives have asked Huang to appear at a closed-door briefing to testify about the relationship.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast said he was prepared to subpoena Huang if he did not respond by the end of Wednesday.

According to The New York Times, US intelligence officials believe Alice Huang was recruited by Chinese intelligence to gather information about the Nvidia CEO and influence him to push for looser restrictions on chip sales to China.

In a statement on Sunday, Jensen Huang apologised to his family and Nvidia employees about the affair.

His company also launched an independent investigation, saying it had no reason to believe that “either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised”. Still, by Wednesday, media reports emerged that Nvidia was preparing to part ways with Huang over the controversy.

US President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was looking into the matter, but he has stood by Huang, calling him an “honourable guy”.

But the pressure on Huang intensified on Tuesday when Republican Senator Kevin Cramer called for him to resign.

“The potential for extortion is so tremendous that something as sensitive as Nvidia chips, I just think he’s got to go,” Cramer said in an interview with Politico.

But Huang, who co-founded Nvidia more than 30 years ago, has shown no signs of heeding that call.

Despite the company’s assurances, experts say the affair raises concerns about what information Alice Huang may have been privy to and what role the relationship may have played in the Nvidia CEO’s decisions.

What are the national security concerns surrounding Nvidia?

Nvidia’s advanced chips, which power much of today’s artificial intelligence, have put the company at the centre of the race for tech dominance between China and the US.

Since 2022, Washington has restricted sales of some of the most advanced chips to China over concerns that they could be used by the country’s military or intelligence agencies.

According to US intelligence officials cited by The New York Times, Alice Huang was tasked with getting Jensen Huang to lobby for looser restrictions on chip exports.

The Nvidia CEO had already been pushing for an easing of the rules, arguing that China’s domestic chip industry would get stronger without better access to US products.

But some experts say it is worth looking at how Alice Huang may have influenced decisions Nvidia made specifically about her former employer Megaspeed, which bought more than $4.8bn worth of Nvidia chips over the span of about two years.

Megaspeed has also been investigated over allegations that it helped Chinese companies get access to restricted chips. Megaspeed denies the allegation.

Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation who studies Chinese technology and intelligence activities, pointed to reports from Bloomberg and The New York Times that Nvidia contacted the US Commerce Department about its investigation into Megaspeed.

He also noted that, in disclosures to the government, Nvidia appeared to vastly undercount the value of the chips it sold to the company.

“The question at hand is whether Nvidia took specific actions with respect to Megaspeed that it might not otherwise have done,” Fedasiuk told Al Jazeera, “possibly as a result of the personal relationship between the two executives.”

What sensitive information could have been a risk?

There are also questions about what sensitive information Alice Huang may have had access to through her relationship with Jensen Huang.

In an analysis published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, senior fellow Jessica Brandt pointed to information about how Nvidia designs its China-specific chips.

“Information about its conversations with policymakers could be helpful for anticipating where those controls and other policies are headed,” she said. “Understanding where it disagrees with government could expose fault lines to exploit. And that’s before we get into anything touching R&D [research and development].”

Fedasiuk raised similar concerns about what Alice Huang could have learned about Nvidia’s internal operations and plans for future products, as well as its customer base, which includes American and foreign tech companies.

He also pointed to Jensen Huang’s close ties to Trump and other senior White House officials.

“I have to wonder what kind of information about those people and about those relationships may have inadvertently made its way to Ms Huang or to Chinese intelligence,” he said.

So far, however, there is no publicly available evidence that Alice Huang got access to sensitive information from Nvidia or influenced Jensen Huang’s decisions. US intelligence also has not made public any evidence that Alice Huang was working for Chinese intelligence.

China has flatly denied the allegations of espionage.

“The claim of so-called ‘Chinese spies’ is completely groundless and is nothing but a smear campaign against China,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun on Monday.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Chip giants stock price falls more than 8 percent amid speculation over co-founder’s position.

Chip giant Nvidia’s stock price has tumbled amid reports that its board of directors is meeting to consider the future of CEO Jensen Huang.

Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading on Wednesday as questions swirled over Huang’s position at the top of the $4.2 trillion company.

The plunge comes after The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times reported that Nvidia’s board of directors would discuss Huang’s position amid controversy over his personal life.

Nvidia did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

The reported meeting comes amid reports that Huang engaged in an extramarital relationship with an Nvidia employee, in addition to an affair with a woman accused of working the Chinese intelligence services.

This is a developing story.

Hackers have twice taken control of supermarket fridges across Europe in less than a month, sparking fires and spoiling millions of euros’ worth of food.

On October 11 and 12, attackers heated units at about 700 French stores to as high as 50C (122F). On November 2, a second wave of suspected cyberattacks affected supermarkets and food businesses in at least nine European countries, including Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.

France has since blamed the first attack on Shahid Kaveh, a cyberunit affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), calling it the first large-scale sabotage cyberattack on French soil. It is not yet clear who was behind the second wave.

The attacks have raised concern about how exposed internet-connected equipment has become, from industrial machinery to household appliances. Al Jazeera illustrates the devices at risk in your home and the essential services you rely on, and what you can do to protect yourself.

How can a fridge be hacked?

A supermarket’s fridges and freezers are run from one control panel, which is connected to the internet so contractors can manage it remotely. Home smart fridges connect the same way, through Wi-Fi, an app or a cloud service.

The attackers reportedly found the supermarket systems using Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected devices. According to Vincent Strubel, head of France’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), they got in through basic security failures:

• Exposed: The equipment was directly connected to the open internet with no extra protection.
• Weak passwords: Many systems were protected only by weak or default logins.
• Outdated: Many units were old models that no longer get security updates.

Once inside, hackers can switch a fridge off, raise its temperature or steal account details. In France, they simply used the controllers’ own defrost function. A poorly protected fridge can also be a doorway to other devices on the same network, from laptops to smart locks.

Speaking to the French Senate on October 21, Strubel warned that the healthcare sector uses the same type of equipment to store vaccines and hazardous materials, from research laboratories to pharmacies.

How hackable is your home?

Essentially, anything connected via the internet could potentially be hacked.

There are about 21 billion short-range connected devices, such as smartwatches, worldwide and 5.4 billion long-range ones, such as remote monitoring systems, according to Kepios’s Digital 2027 Global Overview Report. US internet households now have an average of about 18 connected devices, nearly double the number a decade ago, according to Parks Associates.

Routers are among the biggest targets because they are always online. In April, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that hackers linked to Russia’s GRU military intelligence were hijacking home and small business routers. By tampering with their DNS settings, which turn website names into IP addresses, the hackers redirected users to fake websites to steal passwords and personal details.

Smart TVs can be hacked without their owners knowing. In June, researchers found that more than a third of apps on LG and Samsung smart TVs could let strangers secretly use a household’s internet connection, hiding their own activity behind that home’s IP address.

Robot vacuums can expose even more. Earlier this year, a programmer reportedly found he could control almost 7,000 DJI Romo robot vacuums with a PlayStation 5 controller. Using Claude Code, an AI coding tool made by Anthropic, to work out how the vacuums talked to DJI’s servers, he gained access to their live camera feeds, audio and floor plans of people’s homes.

What vital services can be hacked?

The same weaknesses that expose a fridge can affect power plants, water supplies, banks and hospitals.

Many of these services are run by industrial computers that can be reached online. Since the US-Israel war on Iran began, US agencies have warned that Iran-affiliated hackers are attacking these systems.

In July, a cyberattack in the US state of Minnesota targeted more than 30 community water systems, according to the state’s IT agency. Officials suspected Iran-aligned hackers, and the FBI and CISA warned that water and wastewater systems were increasingly being targeted, with facilities in 12 states affected at the time.

That same month, a cyberattack attributed to Iran-linked hackers forced a small British power plant offline for four days. It was reported as the first successful attack of its kind on UK energy infrastructure.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) lists sectors it considers critical infrastructure. The graphic below shows some of the key ones, and what a hack on each could mean for you.

Banks are targets, too. In late September and early October, hackers stole personal data from at least seven South Korean financial firms, affecting about 68,000 people. Yegaram Savings Bank and Shinhan Bank were hit hardest, with about 40,000 and 25,000 customers affected, respectively.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the attacker used ARTEX, an open-source AI tool developed in China to test networks for weaknesses. US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attacker was likely a China-based individual who also used Claude Code, an assessment it made with moderate confidence.

Which industries are most politically targeted?

The European Repository of Cyber Incidents (EuRepoC), a research database tracking political cyberattacks worldwide, logged 4,932 major incidents between January 2000 and November 2026.

The number of incidents has grown sharply in recent years, peaking at 795 in 2024. About two-thirds of all incidents recorded since 2000 have occurred since 2022.

Governments are the biggest target. State institutions account for nearly 40 percent of all targets, led by the civil service and government ministries, followed by the military, police, political parties and legislatures.

Critical infrastructure is the second most targeted sector, led by health, finance, telecommunications, transport and energy, followed by defence firms, manufacturing, research and digital service providers. Companies, schools, civil society groups and media outlets make up most of the rest.

EuRepoC tracks only politically significant attacks, a fraction of all cyberattacks. Beyond these, hackers often target individuals and companies with scams.

How to protect oneself?

Hackers rely on weaknesses such as weak passwords and devices that no longer receive updates.

Awais Rashid, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Bristol, told Al Jazeera that as infrastructure becomes more digitised, the risk of disruption from cyberattacks has risen. But, he added, “the world works because cybersecurity works effectively”.

The UK’s NCSC also advises people to turn off features they don’t use, such as remote camera access.

If a power plant or water system is hacked, there is little individuals can do. The UK’s Be Ready campaign, launched last month partly in response to cyber-threats, urges households to keep a three-day supply of water, food, medicine, cash and torches.

The graphic below shows five simple steps you can take to protect yourself from hackers.

Announcement follows Trump administration crackdown on visa programs for skilled foreign workers.

United States technology giant IBM has said it will stop sponsoring US foreign worker visas and green cards for most roles in its largest division.

A company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday that its consultancy unit had opted to end sponsorship for most roles.

The company said its participation in US high-skilled visa programmes had been declining for years, adding that the decision came “as skill availability and client needs have evolved”.

IBM Consulting employs more than 150,000 of IBM’s 264,300-strong global workforce.

IBM has become less reliant on so-called H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers in recent years. Only 1,611 H-1B petitions were approved for the company in fiscal year 2026, according to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration has increased pressure on major companies to cut down on their highly skilled foreign workforce in the US. US President Donald Trump has claimed the programme is often subject to fraud and takes work away from skilled Americans and gives it to immigrants.

Last year, the administration announced it would require a one-time $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions.

The administration said in October it was suspending a number of tech companies from a programme that allows H-1B workers to apply for green cards, saying it was cracking down on fraud and ensuring American workers were not being laid off and replaced by foreigners.

The suspended companies included Adobe and top H-1B employers Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Microsoft.

The suspensions were announced within hours of Trump honouring Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

India-born Nadella was one of six business leaders honoured by Trump. Five were foreign-born US citizens, including Tesla boss Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who immigrated from Russia with his family as a child.

Rare bipartisan bill requires data centres to pay for infrastructure, but environmental groups say it falls short.

The United States Senate has voted to move forward on a bipartisan bill that would speed up the process to build new data centres and energy infrastructure in the country.

Nearly all of the chamber’s Republicans, as well as more than a dozen Democrats, voted 73-25 on Monday to take up the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which supporters, including US President Donald Trump, have said is necessary to meet the nation’s growing demand for electricity.

“This Bill is a BIG WIN for U.S. ENERGY INDEPENDENCE and DOMINANCE”, Trump posted on social media Monday as he encouraged lawmakers to support it.

The legislation would overhaul the permitting process for major energy projects – both clean energy and fossil fuel-run – across the US, reduce deadlines for environmental reviews and impose restrictions on when projects can be challenged in the country’s courts. It would also force owners of energy-hungry data centres to pay for the infrastructure that is needed to power them.

Growing anger in the US over those facilities’ use in powering artificial intelligence (AI), which has resulted in rising electricity bills for customers across the country, helped fuel last week’s takeover of the US Congress by Democrats.

“The people sent us a very clear message on Tuesday that they expect us to lower the costs in their daily lives,” Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich, the ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said on Monday. “We don’t have to wait for the new Congress to start lowering costs. We can do that today.”

Authors of the bill claim it will provide $19bn in savings on residential electricity bills through 2040. The number of solar and wind projects connecting to the US electric grid would be doubled, with data centres paying $55bn over the next 10 years to cover their power usage.

But despite the bill’s claims of increasing clean energy projects, environmental organisations are opposed to the legislation. They argue it would also lock in development of fossil fuels, weaken environmental laws and make it harder for US residents to challenge projects in their communities.

Earlier this year, a coalition of national groups – including the Climate Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network and Western Environmental Law Center – issued a joint statement opposing the bill.

“We cannot allow the lies to continue, as the facts are clear: If this backroom permitting reform deal is pushed through, it will enable a no-guardrails buildout of dangerous projects that will harm our health and environment, drive up energy costs, and violate our rights,” they said in September.

“This will be especially harmful for communities of color and lower income neighborhoods already overburdened by pollution and climate impacts.”

While the legislation received rare overwhelming support from both major political parties, the Democrats’ midterm win could complicate its final passage.

Some in the party argue that the legislation should be shelved until new Democratic majorities in the US House and Senate are sworn in early next year.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is on track to become the body’s new speaker in January, criticised the bill last week, warning it “falls short” in several areas.

“We must once again support the clean energy economy and combat the climate crisis with the fierce urgency of now,” a Jeffries spokesperson said in a statement released to the Associated Press.

Jeffries’s office added: “Leader Jeffries will not rubber-stamp legislation that emerges from the Senate without more constructive involvement with our Caucus as we fight to make life more affordable for the American people.”