Chinese Tech Layoffs, GitHub Outage, Yushu Tech Stock Crash, TikTok Food Delivery Game – Weekly IT News

Chinese tech layoffs – On August 18, Black Duck, spun out from New Thought Technology, announced it will exit the Chinese market, close its subsidiary Baida Software, and lay off over 40 employees, giving staff less than two months before the China division shuts down on September 30. An insider suggested the move is driven by geopolitical tensions affecting the domestic‑foreign industry landscape.

GitHub outage – On August 17, GitHub experienced a massive outage lasting 7 hours 47 minutes (13:28 UTC to 21:15 UTC). Core services such as Issues, Pull Requests, API, Actions, and Copilot suffered error rates of 20‑50%. The root cause was load‑balancer saturation in a US central data center; an auto‑scaling configuration flaw prevented timely scaling, and a bug in the VS Code client amplified Copilot token requests by roughly tenfold. GitHub mitigated the issue by pausing affected nodes, reducing gateway retries, and throttling requests at the load‑balancer layer before fully restoring services at 21:02.

Yushu Tech stock crash – After debuting on the STAR market on August 19 with a 629.44% opening surge (price ¥1100, market cap ¥4449 billion), Yushu Tech fell 6.51% to ¥790 on August 20 and continued to drop, closing at ¥687, an 18.7% decline and a loss of ¥1670 billion in market value. Major shareholders include Liang Wenfeng’s Deep Search, Huanfang Quant, and Jiuzhang Assets, as well as Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, which holds 1.61 million shares valued at over ¥177 billion at the opening price.

TikTok’s “Chancat Delivery” game – On August 20, TikTok quietly launched a mini‑game called “Chancat Delivery” that simulates ordering food. Users can browse virtual shops, select dishes, claim coupons, and complete a checkout flow that mirrors real delivery apps, including shop ratings and estimated delivery times. Orders are never fulfilled; payments are stored in a virtual “money jar” that users can withdraw at any time. The feature aims to satisfy late‑night cravings while reducing actual spending and encourages social sharing.

ByteDance Seed re‑organization – ByteDance’s large‑model division Seed underwent a structural overhaul, creating four new first‑level departments: Pretrain Data (consolidating multimodal data teams), Horizon RL (unifying reinforcement‑learning teams), Product Posstrain‑Work (serving B‑side applications and Agentic model deployment), and retaining the Application team as Product Posttrain‑Chat for C‑side dialogue models.

GLM‑5.3 API launch – Zhipu AI announced that the GLM‑5.3 model’s API is now publicly available, following the GLM‑3.4 API release on August 19. GLM‑5.3, which excels at complex coding, defensive cybersecurity, and long‑range tasks, is integrated into platforms such as ZCode, with pricing identical to GLM‑5.2. Model weights are scheduled to be open‑sourced on August 28.

Red Candle Story shutdown – ByteDance’s paid‑novel platform Red Candle Story ceased operations on August 17 after a staged shutdown plan. The app, owned by Jiangxi BiHui MoYing Tech (100% held by Beijing BiMo LiuXiang Tech), offered both free and paid content. The service will be fully offline by August 17, 2026, with servers shut down and the app no longer accessible.

iPhone 18 launch rumor – Multiple sources indicate that Apple’s iPhone 18 series launch event is slated for September 9, 2026, featuring the iPhone 18 Pro, Pro Max, and the first foldable iPhone Ultra, while the standard iPhone 18 is pushed to spring 2027. The event will be held at Apple Park’s Steve Jobs Theatre, hosted by new CEO John Ternus.