In a post on the online hacking forum Breach Forums last week, someone using the handle “ChinaDan” offered to sell nearly 24 terabytes (24 TB) of data including what they claimed was information on 1 billion people and “several billion case records” for 10 Bitcoin, worth about $200,000.

The data purportedly includes information from the Shanghai National Police database including names, addresses, national identification numbers and mobile phone numbers as well as case details.

A sample of data seen by The Associated Press listed names, birthdates, ages and mobile numbers. One person was listed as having been born in “2020,” with their age listed as “1,” suggesting that information on minors was included in the data obtained in the breach.

The Associated Press could not immediately verify the authenticity of the data samples. Shanghai police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The data leak initially sparked discussion on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo, but censors have since moved to block keyword searches for “Shanghai data leak.”

One person said they were skeptical until they managed to verify some of the personal data leaked online by attempting to search for people on Alipay using their personal information.

“Everyone, please be careful in case there are more phone scams in the future!” they said in a Weibo post.

Another person commented on Weibo that the leak means everyone is “running naked” — slang used to refer to a lack of privacy — and it’s “horrifying.”

Experts said the breach, if confirmed, would be the biggest in history.

Kendra Schaefer, a partner for technology at policy research firm Trivium China, said in a tweet that it’s “hard to parse truth from the rumor mill, but can confirm file exists.”

Such data leaks are fairly common, according to Michael Gazeley, managing director at Hong Kong-based security firm Network Box.

“There are approximately 12 billion compromised accounts posted on the Dark Web right now. That’s more than the total number of people in the world,” he said, adding that a majority of data leaks often come from the U.S.

Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist at cybersecurity firm Sophos, said that the breach is “potentially incredibly embarrassing to the Chinese government,” and the political harm would probably outweigh damage to the people whose data was leaked.

Most of the data is similar to what advertising companies that run banner ads would have, he said.

“When you’re talking about a billion people’s information and it’s static information, it’s not about where they traveled, who they communicated with or what they were doing, then it becomes very much less interesting,” Wisniewski said.

Still, once hackers get data and put it online it’s impossible to fully remove.

“The information, once it’s unleashed, is forever out there,” Wisniewski said. “So if someone believes their information was part of this attack, they have to assume it’s forever available to anyone and they should be taking precautions to protect themselves.”

A major cryptocurrency exchange said it had stepped up verification procedures to guard against fraud attempts such as using personal information from the reported hack to take over people’s accounts.

Zhao Changpeng, CEO of Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, said in a tweet Monday that its threat intelligence had detected the sale of “1 billion resident records.”

“This has impact on hacker detection/prevention measures, mobile numbers used for account take overs, etc.” Zhao wrote in his tweets, before saying that Binance had already stepped up verification measures.

In 2020, a major cyberattack believed to be by Russian hackers compromised several U.S. federal agencies such as the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, telecommunications firms and defense contractors.

Last year, over 533 million Facebook users had their data published in a hacking forum after hackers scraped its data due to a vulnerability that has since been patched.

——

AP journalist Emily Wang in Beijing and researcher Chen Si in Shanghai contributed to this report.

The lawsuit was filed in the Karnataka High Court in southern Bengaluru city and comes after the Indian government in February warned company executives of criminal action if they failed to comply with the takedown orders, the Press Trust of India and the Bar and Bench legal news site reported.

A Twitter spokesperson, Aditi Shorewal, declined to comment or specify what type of content the company was told to block. She did not confirm that Twitter had filed the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is part of a growing confrontation between Twitter and New Delhi after the Indian government last year passed a new set of sweeping regulations giving it more power to police online content.

The new rules require companies to erase or block content that authorities deem unlawful. Under the laws, employees of social media websites and technology companies can be held criminally liable for failing to comply with the government’s orders.

“It is everyone’s responsibility to abide by the laws passed by the country’s Parliament,” India’s IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told reporters Tuesday, when he was asked about the lawsuit.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has sought for years to control social media and has often directed Twitter to take down tweets or accounts that appear critical of his party and administration.

Twitter complied with most of those orders in the past but also resisted others and has called the new rules a “potential threat to freedom of expression.” The company has removed content related to anti-government farmer protests and tweets criticising the Modi administration’s handling of the pandemic.

The Indian government has called the new rules necessary to tackle disinformation, hate speech and other troubles. Officials have warned Twitter that non-compliance with the rules could mean that the company would lose its liability protections as an intermediary, meaning Twitter could face lawsuits over content.

Relations between the Indian government and Twitter have been thorny since the laws were passed.

In May last year, police raided Twitter’s office after the company labelled a tweet by Modi’s party spokesman as “manipulated media.”

That same month, WhatsApp sued the Indian government to defend what it said was its users’ privacy and stop new rules that would require it to make messages “traceable” to external parties. That case is still pending in an Indian court.

Experts have criticised the new rules and said they amount to censorship. They have also accused the Modi government of silencing criticism on social media, particularly Twitter. Modi’s party denies the claim.

Police in New Delhi last week arrested a journalist over a tweet from 2018 that an anonymous Twitter user alleged was hurtful to sentiments of a “particular religion.”

CureVac, which last year reported disappointing results from late-stage testing of its own first-generation COVID-19 shot, earlier this year started a clinical trial of a second-generation vaccine candidate developed with British pharmaceutical company GSK.

The company said it was seeking “fair compensation” from BioNTech for the alleged infringement, but it didn’t cite an amount.

CureVac said it would not pursue a court injunction and doesn’t “intend to take legal action that impedes the production, sale or distribution” by BioNTech and partner Pfizer of their successful Comirnaty vaccine.

Both CureVac and BioNTech have worked to develop the messenger RNA technology employed in their respective vaccines and potentially for other uses.

CureVac said it filed its suit against BioNTech and two subsidiaries at the state court in Duesseldorf. It asserted in a statement that its intellectual property portfolio “protects multiple inventions that are considered essential to the design and development of BioNTech’s SARS CoV-2 mRNA vaccine, among others.”

Those, it said, relate to the engineering of mRNA molecules, including sequence modifications to increase stability, and mRNA vaccine formulations specific to COVID-19 vaccines.

BioNTech said in a statement that it values and respects valid intellectual property rights, adding that its “work is original, and we will vigorously defend it against all allegations of patent infringement.”

“However, we are aware that it is not unusual that other companies in the pharmaceutical industry, having witnessed the success of Comirnaty, are now suggesting that the vaccine potentially infringes their intellectual property rights,” it said.

___

Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

1. Minecraft, Mojang

2. Heads Up!, Warner Bros.

3. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

4. HotSchedules, HotSchedules

5. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

6. Procreate Pocket, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

7. Rovio Classics: AB, Rovio Entertainment Oyj

8. Monopoly – Classic Board Game, Marmalade Game Studio

9. Poppy Playtime Chapter 1, MOBGames

10. Papa’s Freezeria To Go!, Flipline Studios

Top Free iPhone Apps:

1. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream, Google LLC

2. TikTok, TikTok Ltd.

3. Google Maps, Google LLC

4. Instagram, Instagram, Inc.

5. Facebook, Meta Platforms, Inc.

6. Messenger, Meta Platforms, Inc.

7. Google, Google LLC

8. Snapchat, Snap, Inc.

9. Netflix, Netflix Inc.

10. WhatsApp Messenger, WhatsApp Inc.

Top Paid iPad Apps:

1. Procreate, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

2. Minecraft, Mojang

3. Poppy Playtime Chapter 1, MOBGames

4. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

5. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

6. Toca Kitchen 2, Toca Boca AB

7. Stardew Valley, ConcernedApe

8. Rovio Classics: AB, Rovio Entertainment Oyj

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10. Monopoly – Classic Board Game, Marmalade Game Studio

Top Free iPad Apps:

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2. Netflix, Netflix, Inc.

3. Craft Parkour : 3D Blocky Race, Trang Nguyen Thi

4. Disney+, Disney

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6. Amazon Prime Video, AMZN Mobile LLC

7. Roblox, Roblox Corporation

8. Stumble Guys, Kitka Games

9. Dig Deep, Crazy Labs

10. Subway Surfers, Sybo Games ApS

The U.K.’s central bank said that the crashes exposed vulnerabilities in the crypto markets reminiscent of previous bouts of financial turmoil.

Extreme volatility in the crypto markets, including so-called stablecoins, resulted in “fire sales” and amplified price falls, the bank said in its latest financial stability report.

While overall financial stability wasn’t threatened, the bank worried that “systemic risks” would grow as cryptocurrencies become more intertwined with the wider financial system and called for “enhanced regulatory and law enforcement frameworks.”

“Technology doesn’t change the laws of economics and finance and risks,” Jon Cunliffe, the deputy governor for financial stability, said at a press conference. “We need now to bring in the regulatory system that will manage those risks in the crypto world in the same way that we manage them in the conventional world.”

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have tumbled this year, slashing the total value of cryptocurrencies from $3 trillion at its peak in late to 2021 to $900 billion, the bank said.

One of the biggest meltdowns involved the stablecoin Terra, which imploded in May, erasing tens of billions of dollars in value with little or no accountability. Stablecoins had been seen as a safer bet among cryptocurrencies because their value is usually pegged to a government-backed currency, such as the U.S. dollar, or precious metals such as gold.

Officials across Europe have been stepping up scrutiny of the cryptocurrency industry.

The U.K. Treasury has proposed regulating stablecoins that are used as payments. Last week the European Union signed a provisional deal for a package of sweeping regulations for the bloc’s 27 member nations to tame what the deal’s lead negotiator called the “Wild West of the crypto world.”

Close to half or more of U.S. adults say they are not likely to attend virtual activities, receive virtual health care, have groceries delivered or use curbside pickup after the coronavirus pandemic is over, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Less than 3 in 10 say they’re very likely to use any of those options at least some of the time.

Still, close to half also say it would be a good thing if virtual options for health care, for community events and for activities like fitness classes or religious services continue after the pandemic.

“Rather than this either-or, I think we’re more likely to be facing a hybrid future,” said Donna Hoffman, director of the Center for the Connected Consumer at the George Washington School of Business. “People have found convenience in some of these virtual options that just makes sense, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with like keeping you safe or the pandemic even though they came of age during the pandemic.”

Digital daily routines became the default in 2020 as the nation reacted to the rapidly spreading virus, which prompted lockdowns, closed schools and shuttered businesses. Some substitutions, like online shopping and video conference calling, already existed. Others were reimagined or popularized during the pandemic.

Either way, Hoffman said, there was “rapid” deployment and adoption of virtual services. It was a question of “how are we going to make this work?” she said.

Cornelius Hairston said his family took precautions throughout the pandemic because his wife is a first responder in the health care field.

“We tried to stay in as much as we could and only come out for essentials,” said Hairston, 40, who recently moved to Roanoke, Virginia.

Hairston joked that his twin 4-year-old boys are “COVID babies” who didn’t even go to a grocery store for much of their young lives. The family used delivery services almost exclusively to avoid venturing out to crowded stores. But going forward, he only expects to use them “from time to time.”

For Angie Lowe, the convenience of telemedicine and time saved was reason enough to do it again even though she and her husband returned to doing things in public more than a year ago.

Lowe had her first telemedicine appointment early in the pandemic when feeling “lonely” and “stuck at home” kept her from sleeping well. She was able to talk with the doctor without having to take extra time off of work to drive to and wait in a medical center.

“It was my first telemedicine appointment, but it won’t be my last,” said Lowe, 48, of Sterling, Illinois. “If I can do it, I’m going to do it.”

For many, though, drawbacks outweigh the benefits of relying on digital services in the future. Adults age 50 or older are especially likely to say they are not planning to use the virtual options asked about on the poll going forward, even though many were introduced during the pandemic to protect the at-risk population.

Despite feeling antsy about COVID-19 and infection rates in Phoenix, Tony DiGiovane, 71, said he found curbside pickup at grocery stores and restaurants to be more hassle than they’re worth.

“By the time I picked up the stuff, I needed more stuff,” he said of his grocery orders, and “something’s always missing or wrong” on takeout orders.

Karen Stewart, 63, recognizes the benefits of video calls, but she’s also found them to be limiting. That’s the case in her job organizing after school programming for kids. She also now sees some of her doctors online, one who provides virtual care almost exclusively and another who uses virtual care in between office visits.

She likes that she doesn’t have to drive, but it means a doctor or nurse can’t take her vitals or be “hands on” in her care. It was “scary,” for example, when all of her appointments in the lead-up to a surgery were online, she said.

“When I do that they they can’t take my blood pressure, my pulse. There’s things that a doctor might pick up on that they can’t see online,” said Stewart of Perris, California.

The pandemic created an opportunity to balance in-person and virtual services to support the physical and mental health of older adults, said Alycia Bayne, a principal research scientist at NORC. That “could be particularly beneficial to older adults with different health issues, mobility limitations, people who lack transportation options, people who do not have or live near a robust social networks like family and friends to lean on,” she said.

Still, there remain limitations with technology access, broadband access and digital literacy, which Bayne said may help explain why the poll finds older adults less likely to use digital services after the pandemic.

Despite the age gap on use of services, similar percentages of adults across ages say it’s a good thing for virtual options for health care, for community events and meetings and for activities to continue after the pandemic.

“They recognize the benefits of virtual services, but they’re also ready to start getting back to their pre-pandemic routines,” she said. “The silver lining, of course, is that these services are now available.”

___

The poll of 1,001 adults was conducted May 12-16 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

___

Rico reported from Atlanta.

It’s been an unusual journey already for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy.

Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told The Associated Press it was hard to put his excitement into words.

“It’s probably going to take a while to sink in. It’s been a project that has taken us two, two-and-a-half years and is just incredibly, incredibly difficult to execute,” he said. “So to see it all come together tonight and see that spacecraft on its way to the moon, it’s just absolutely epic.”

Beck said the relatively low cost of the mission — NASA put it at $32.7 million — marked the beginning of a new era for space exploration.

“For some tens of millions of dollars, there is now a rocket and a spacecraft that can take you to the moon, to asteroids, to Venus, to Mars,” Beck said. “It’s an insane capability that’s never existed before.”

If the rest of the mission is successful, the Capstone satellite will send back vital information for months as the first to take a new orbit around the moon called a near-rectilinear halo orbit: a stretched-out egg shape with one end of the orbit passing close to the moon and the other far from it.

Eventually, NASA plans to put a space station called Gateway into the orbital path, from which astronauts can descend to the moon’s surface as part of its Artemis program.

Beck said the advantage of the new orbit is that it minimizes fuel use and allows the satellite — or a space station — to stay in constant contact with Earth.

The Electron rocket that launched June 28 from New Zealand was carrying a second spacecraft called Photon, which separated after nine minutes. The satellite was carried for six days in Photon, with the spacecraft’s engines firing periodically to raise its orbit farther and farther from Earth.

A final engine burst Monday allowed Photon to break from Earth’s gravitational pull and send the satellite on its way. The plan now is for the 25-kilogram (55-pound) satellite to far overshoot the moon before falling back into the new lunar orbit Nov. 13. The satellite will use tiny amounts of fuel to make a few planned trajectory course corrections along the way.

Beck said they would decide over the coming days what to do with Photon, which had completed its tasks and still had a bit of fuel left in the tank.

“There’s a number of really cool missions that we can actually do with it,” Beck said.

For the mission, NASA teamed up with two commercial companies: California-based Rocket Lab and Colorado-based Advanced Space, which owns and operates the Capstone satellite.

___

Find more AP Science coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/science

The investigation was launched after authorized content on the army’s YouTube account was replaced with a video feed promoting cryptocurrencies that included images of billionaire Elon Musk. The Army’s Twitter account retweeted a number of posts about non-fungible tokens, unique digital images that can be bought and sold but have no physical counterpart.

“Apologies for the temporary interruption to our feed,’’ the army said in a tweet posted after the Twitter account was restored on Sunday. “We will conduct a full investigation and learn from this incident. Thanks for following us, and normal service will now resume.”

The Ministry of Defense said late Sunday that both breaches had been “resolved.”

While internet users were unable to access the Army’s YouTube site on Monday, a spokesperson said the site was down for standard maintenance. The Twitter feed was operating normally.

Although U.K. officials have previously raised concerns about state-sponsored Russian hacking, the military did not speculate on who was responsible for Sunday’s breaches.

“The army takes information security extremely seriously, and until their investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further,” the Ministry of Defense said.

The company said data transmission had largely been restored by Monday morning, but service restrictions were still causing many users to have trouble with making phone calls and sending short messages.

The outage started in the early hours of Saturday during a scheduled maintenance work at a facility in western Tokyo.

It disabled text messaging, phone calls and other services for more than 39 million users of KDDI’s mobile services. Parcel deliveries also were disrupted.

Over the weekend, the Meteorological Agency was unable to send weather data at hundreds of stations, dozens of cash machines were disabled in central Japan, and Tokyo and other municipalities had trouble reaching COVID-19 patients subject to health monitoring at home.

The major outage came just ahead of a July 10 parliamentary election and was seen as embarrassment for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government, which has been promoting digitization of the world’s No. 3 economy.

The government was quick to address public concern over the problem.

“It is extremely regrettable that mobile phone service, which is a crucial infrastructure for social and economic activity, has been unusable for such a long time,” Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiji Kihara told reporters on Monday.

He said the government was taking the situation “seriously” and urged KDDI to provide a thorough explanation. Kihara said he expected KDDI to “sincerely” consider compensation for possible damage claims from users.

On Sunday, KDDI President Makoto Takahashi apologized and provided an initial explanation about what happened and the outlook for resumption of disrupted services.

“We consider this a severe incident,” Internal affairs and communications minister Yasushi Kaneko said on Sunday. The outage was especially unfortunate because it disrupted emergency calls at a time when people were facing increased risks of COVID-19 and heat strokes and potential emergencies due to an approaching typhoon.

An outage last year by rival NTT DoCoMo affected nearly 13 million people.

In the 6-3 decision that was narrowly tailored to the Environmental Protection Agency, the court ruled Thursday that the EPA does not have broad authority to reduce power plant emissions that contribute to global warming. The precedent is widely expected to invite challenges of other rules set by government agencies.

“Every agency is going to face new hurdles in the wake of this confusing decision,” said Alexandra Givens, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based digital rights nonprofit. “But hopefully the agencies will continue doing their jobs and push forward.”

The Federal Trade Commission, in particular, has been pursuing an aggressive agenda in consumer protection, data privacy and tech industry competition under a leader appointed last year by President Joe Biden.

Biden’s picks for the five-member Federal Communications Commission have also been pursuing stronger “net neutrality” protections banning internet providers from slowing down or blocking access to websites and applications that don’t pay for premium service.

A former chief technologist at the FTC during President Donald Trump’s administration said the ruling is likely to instill some fear in lawyers at the FTC and other federal agencies about how far they can go in making new rules affecting businesses.

The court “basically said when it comes to major policy changes that can transform entire sectors of the economy, Congress has to make those choices, not agencies,” said Neil Chilson, who is now a fellow at libertarian-leaning Stand Together, founded by the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

Givens disagreed, arguing that many agencies, especially the FTC, have clear authority and should be able to withstand lawsuits inspired by the EPA decision. She noted that Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion, repeatedly described it as an “extraordinary” situation.

Givens is among the tech advocates calling for Congress to act with urgency to make laws protecting digital privacy and other tech matters. But she said laws typically stay on the books for decades, and it’s unrealistic to expect Congress to weigh in on every new technical development that questions an agency’s mandate.

“We need a democratic system where Congress can give expert agencies the power to address issues when they arise, even when those issues are unforeseen,” she said. “The government literally can’t work with Congress legislating every twist and turn.”

Empowered by Congress in the 1970s to tackle “unfair or deceptive” business practices, the FTC has been in the vanguard of Biden’s government-wide mandate to promote competition in some industries, including Big Tech, health care and agriculture. A panoply of targets include hearing aid prices, airline baggage fees and “product of USA” labels on food.

Under Chair Lina Khan, the FTC also has widened the door to more actively writing new regulations in what critics say is a broader interpretation of the agency’s legal authority. That initiative could run into stiff legal challenges in the wake of the high court decision. The ruling could call into question the agency’s regulatory agenda — leading it to either tread more cautiously or face tougher and more expensive legal challenges.

Khan “hasn’t really been someone who pursues soft measures, so it may be a damn-the-torpedoes approach,” Chilson said.

University of Massachusetts internet policy expert Ethan Zuckerman said it would be hard to gauge any potential impact of the court’s ruling on existing tech regulation. That’s partly because “there’s just not that much tech regulation to undo,” he said.

He said one target could be the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “a bête noire for many conservatives.” Big companies such as Facebook parent Meta could also potentially appeal tough enforcement actions on the idea that federal agencies weren’t explicitly authorized to regulate social media.

“We’re in uncharted territory, with a court that’s taking a wrecking ball to precedent and seems hell-bent on implementing as many right-wing priorities as possible in the shortest possible time,” Zuckerman said.

The ruling could dampen the appetite for agencies like the FTC to act to limit harm from artificial intelligence and other new technologies. It could have less effect on new rules that are more clearly in the realm of the agency imposing them.

Michael Brooks, chief counsel for the nonprofit Center for Auto Safety, said the ruling isn’t likely to change the government’s ability to regulate auto safety or self-driving vehicles, although it does open the door to court challenges.

For instance, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has clear authority to regulate auto safety from a 1966 motor vehicle safety law, Brooks said.

“As long as the rules they are issuing pertain to the safety of the vehicle and not anything that’s outside of their authority, as long as it’s related to safety, I don’t see how a court could do an end run around the safety act,” he said.

Unlike the EPA, an agency with authority granted by multiple, complex laws, NHTSA’s “authority is just so crystal clear,” Brooks said.

NHTSA could have problems if it strayed too far from regulating safety. For example, if it enacted regulations aimed to shift buyers away from SUVs to more fuel-efficient cars, that might be struck down, he said. But the agency has historically stuck to its mission of regulating auto safety with some authority on fuel economy, he said.

However, it’s possible that a company such as Tesla, which has tested the limits of NHTSA’s powers, could sue and win due to an unpredictable Supreme Court, Brooks said.

___

Associated Press writers Marcy Gordon in Washington, Frank Bajak in Boston and Tom Krisher in Detroit contributed to this report.

The company behind the internet’s dominant internet search engine and the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones outlined the new privacy protections in a Friday blog post.

Besides automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, Google also cited counseling centers, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, and cosmetic surgery clinics as other destinations that will be erased from users’ location histories. Users have always had the option edit their location histories on their own, but Google will proactively do it for them as an added level of protection.

“We’re committed to delivering robust privacy protections for people who use our products, and we will continue to look for new ways to strengthen and improve these protections,” Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google senior vice president, wrote in the blog post.

The pledge comes amid escalating pressure on Google and other Big Tech companies to do more to shield the troves of sensitive personal information through their digital services and products from government authorities and other outsiders.

The calls for more stringent privacy controls were triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion. That reversal could make abortion illegal in more than a dozen states, raising the specter that records about people’s location, texts, searches and emails could be used in prosecutions against abortion procedures or even for medical care sought in a miscarriage.

Like other technology companies, Google each year receives thousands of government demands for users’ digital records as part of misconduct investigations. Google says it pushes back against search warrants and other demands that are overly broad or appear to be baseless.

The company on Saturday disclosed it sold more than 254,000 cars and SUVs from April through June, an 18% drop from the first three months of this year and also well below the pace in last year’s final quarter.

The last time Tesla sold fewer vehicles globally was in the third quarter of 2021 when it delivered 241,000.

On Friday, the rest of the industry reported a 21% drop in sales during the second quarter as the average price for vehicles skyrocketed to a record of $45,844 amid soaring inflation, according to J.D. Power.

Tesla’s sales drop may be a harbinger of weaker second-quarter earnings for the Austin, Texas, company, which is the world’s top-seller of battery-powered vehicles and has posted net profits for nearly three years. Tesla plans to release its full results for the April-June period on July 20.

Like many other stocks, Tesla shares have been hard hit this year. But the 35% decline in Tesla’s stock price hasn’t been entirely tied to the company’s see-sawing fortunes.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also has made a $44 billion bid for Twitter, which he placed on hold after complaining that it has too many spam bot users who aren’t humans. Much of the erosion in Tesla’s value has occurred since Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder and then launched a takeover bid that has raised concerns he has too much on his already crowded plate

Musk has used his own Twitter account, which now has more than 100 million followers, to discuss the pandemic restrictions that forced the Shanghai factory to temporarily close during the quarter. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives estimates that more than 40% of Tesla’s sales come from China, and that the Shanghai factory produced about 70,000 fewer vehicles due to the shutdowns.

But Tesla signaled things are getting better Saturday, saying it produced more vehicles during June than in any other month in its history. The company didn’t disclose the number of vehicles manufactured during June.

As of early Saturday afternoon, Musk hadn’t tweeted about Tesla’s second-quarter sales. But he created a bit of a stir late Friday with ending an uncharacteristically long nine-day silence on Twitter. His Friday tweets included one with him and four his children meeting with Pope Francis.

Tesla’s latest delivery numbers came out a week after the release of an interview with Musk in which he described new factories in Austin and Berlin as “money furnaces” that were losing billions of dollars because supply chain breakdowns were limiting the number of cars they can produce.

In a May 30 interview with a Tesla owners’ club that was just released last week, Musk said that getting the Berlin and Austin plants functional “are overwhelmingly our concerns. Everything else is a very small thing,” Musk said, but added that “it’s all gonna get fixed real fast.”

Musk also has discussed making salaried workers return to offices and a possible 10% cut in Tesla’s work force due to a possible recession.

Supply chain breakdowns since the onset of COVID-19 two years ago have been especially debilitating for automakers, who get parts from all corners of the globe. A lack of computer chips needed to run cars’ computers compounded automakers’ problems and sent prices for used and new cars skyrocketing.

As the pandemic erupted in the U.S. in 2020, automakers had to shut factories for eight weeks to help stop the virus from spreading. Some parts companies canceled orders for semiconductors. At the same time, demand for laptops, tablets and gaming consoles skyrocketed as people stuck at home upgraded their devices.

By the time auto production resumed, chip makers had shifted production to consumer goods, creating a shortage of weather-resistant automotive-grade chips. Although Tesla has fared better than other automakers, the industry still can’t get enough chips.

___

AP Business Writer Michael Liedtke contributed to this story from Berkeley, California.

“Honored to meet @Pontifex yesterday,” Musk tweeted of the Friday afternoon audience, alongside a photo showing Musk, Francis and four of Musk’s teenage children.

The Vatican didn’t announce the audience or provide any information about what was discussed. Musk’s tweet followed one of a street scene in Venice, suggesting he might have had other stops on his tour.

Francis frequently meets with high-profile figures in strictly private audiences that are held in a reception room of the Vatican hotel where he lives. A common talking point he uses when meeting with corporate CEOs is to appeal for them to use wealth and technology to help the poorest while caring for God’s creation.

On June 21, Twitter’s board recommended shareholders approve Musk’s proposed purchase, though shares of Twitter remain far below his offering price, signaling considerable doubt that the sale will actually happen.

The modified jumbo jet took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in the Mojave Desert and released the rocket over the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Los Angeles.

The launch was procured by the U.S. Space Force for a Defense Department test program. The seven payloads will conduct various experiments.

“And there we have it, folks!” the company tweeted shortly before 1 a.m. local time, about an hour after the rocket separated from the 747. “NewtonFour successfully reignited and deployed all customer spacecraft into their target orbit.”

It was Virgin Orbit’s fourth commercial launch and first night launch. The launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday night, but that attempt was scrubbed due to a propellant temperature issue.

Virgin Orbit named the mission “Straight Up” after the hit on Paula Abdul’s debut studio album “Forever Your Girl,” which was released through Virgin Records in 1988.

Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 by British billionaire Richard Branson. It is headquartered in Long Beach, California, and currently conducts launches from the Mojave airport but is planning international missions.

Later this year, the company will launch two satellites on a mission flying out of Newquay Airport in Cornwall, England. The satellites will conduct radio signal monitoring tests in a joint project of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.

The website was designed to only show general data about the number and location of concealed carry gun permits, broken down by year and county. But for about 24 hours starting Monday a spreadsheet with names and personal information was just a few clicks away, ready for review or downloading.

Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security, said there should have been access controls to make sure the information stayed out of the reach of unwanted parties, and the sensitive data should have been encrypted so it would have been unusable.

The damage done depends on who accessed the data, she said. Criminals could sell or use the private identifying information, or use permit-seekers’ criminal histories “for blackmail and leverage,” she said.

Already some are attempting to use the information to criticize gun control advocates who they say were revealed as having concealed carry permits. An online site called The Gun Feed included a post calling out a top lawyer for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. But the center said the site had the wrong person — someone with the same name as its lawyer.

Five other firearms databases were also compromised, but Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office has been unable to say what happened or even how many people are in the databases.

“We are conducting a comprehensive and through investigation into all aspects of the incident and will take any and all appropriate measures in response to what we learn,” his office said in a statement Friday.

It said one of the other databases listed handguns but not people, while the others, including on gun violence restraining orders, did not contain names but may have had other identifying information.

“The volume of information is so incredibly sensitive,” said Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California.

“Deputy DAs, police officers, judges, they do everything they can to protect their residential addresses,” he said. “The peril that the attorney general has put hundreds of thousands of people … in is incalculable.”

Attorney Chuck Michel, president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said he has been fielding hundreds of calls and emails from gun owners looking to join what he expects will be a class-action lawsuit.

The improper release came days after the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for people to carry hidden weapons, and as Bonta worked with state lawmakers to patch California’s newly vulnerable concealed carry law.

No evidence has so far revealed that the leak was deliberate. Independent cybersecurity experts said the release could easily have been lax oversight.

Bonta’s office has been unable to say whether and how often the databases were downloaded. Moussouris said the agency has that information if it was keeping access logs, which she called a basic and necessary step to protect sensitive data.

Tim Marley, a vice president for risk management at the cybersecurity firm Cerberus Sentinel, questioned the speed of the agency’s response to a problem with a website that should have been constantly monitored.

“Given the sensitive nature of the data exposed and potential impact to those directly involved, I would expect a response in much less than 24 hours from notification to action,” he said.

Bonta’s office said it is reviewing the timeline to see when it discovered the problem.

The design of public websites “should always be done with an effort to design security into the process,” Marley said.

Developers also need to properly test their systems before launching any new code or modifying existing code, he said. Yet often organizations rush changes because they are focused “on making it work over making it work securely.”

Every Republican state senator and Assembly member called on Bonta, a Democrat running for reelection, to increase his disclosures about the information lapse, which they said violates state law. They also asked for specific information about the release and investigation, and senators criticized the department for an apparent lack of testing and security.