Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, succeeded on Saturday in recovering a spacecraft from its launch pad for the first time, after its Starship vehicle returned safely after a day it spent in orbit.
The vehicle appeared from the clouds after a landing flight during which it crossed the continent, and slid smoothly between two robotic arms above launch pad No. 2, according to what was reported by “Agence France-Presse.”
This is the fifteenth test flight of the largest and most powerful missile system in the world. It was scheduled to witness an unprecedented double operation to capture both the “Super Heavy” rocket booster stage and the “Starship” vehicle, but the attempt to recover the booster stage was canceled on Friday.
The success of recovering “Starship” constitutes a milestone in the space sector’s decades-long endeavors to develop fully reusable missile systems, which may significantly reduce mission costs and allow launching operations to be carried out at a higher frequency.
“If successful, it will prove that it is possible to recover a fully orbital launch vehicle at its launch pad,” Starship official Jessie Anderson said before the rocket was picked up.
The vehicle, which bears the name of the missile system, completed 14 orbits around the Earth and during its 22-hour journey, it launched 26 satellites within Musk’s “Starlink” network to provide Internet via satellite.
The process of capturing “Starship” involves great complexity, as the vehicle descended from a much higher altitude and at a speed much higher than the landing speed of the booster stage, which SpaceX has succeeded in recovering three times previously.
Like Super Heavy, Starship carried out a guided landing to settle vertically between two robotic arms above the launch pad.
Some versions of “Starship” were designed to place Internet satellites and data centers in orbit, while other versions will be dedicated to transporting humans to the moon and Mars.
The US Space Agency (NASA) is counting on “Starship” to be a landing vehicle on the moon’s surface within the “Artemis” program.
Agency Director Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on Friday for “another amazing launch,” without mentioning the failure to recover the booster stage, according to Agence France-Presse.
Musk, the richest person in the world, has transformed the space sector with his partially reusable Falcon rockets, which are regularly used to launch satellites and transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
But the “Starship” project has witnessed delays as the company faces new engineering challenges, including transferring fuel to the vehicle while it is in orbit, a process for which the company has not yet found a solution and which is necessary for any trip to the moon or Mars.
The “Super Heavy” booster stage still needs further tuning. A technical defect occurred during its landing on Friday, forcing the company to divert its course towards the Gulf of Mexico, opposite the launch site. The booster stage automatically destroyed itself in a ball of flame before hitting the water.
SpaceX is investing heavily in expanding its production and launch capabilities, after raising about $85.7 billion when it listed its shares on the stock exchange in June.
During a tour of the company's 93,000-square-meter factory in Starbase on Friday, SpaceX officials told reporters that the company is now capable of producing a spacecraft every two weeks and a booster rocket stage every four weeks.
The Italian Authority for the Protection of Personal Data imposed a fine of 805 million euros on “Meta”, the parent company of “Facebook”, for accessing users’ photos without obtaining their consent, separately from this specific use, according to what it announced on Saturday.
The authority said, in a statement, that “Meta” accessed, through the “Facebook” application on devices operating on the Android system, Italian users’ photos, their videos, and associated data, “without obtaining specific consent and without informing them adequately,” according to “Agence France-Presse.”
In late October, a judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in a case in which the court found the company responsible for misleading its users in the state about how their data was used, in a case related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The punishment is standard for the group that denounced it, describing it as a “tax” on freedom of expression.
The new fine announced today, Saturday, is also one of the largest fines imposed by an Italian authority on a giant technology company.
In 2021, Amazon was fined more than 1.1 billion euros for violating the competition law, before the fine was reduced to 752 million euros following an appeal.
Meta can also appeal the decision. The American group did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday afternoon.
The fine imposed on Facebook relates to the “Get Suggestions from the Photo Gallery” feature, available since 2023, which suggests to the user while browsing the application pictures and video clips from his phone that he can publish.
According to the Italian authority, Facebook was requesting access to the photo gallery through a single permission covering the entire application, preceded by a general phrase “activate other features,” without clarifying to the user that it also allows the user to use the contents of his photo gallery to submit suggestions for publishing.
Meta must “request approval for this feature separately and specifically, explain its purpose clearly to users, and explain that it requires access to the photo gallery, and how to disable it.”
The authority explained that it took into account, when determining the value of the fine, “the large number of people concerned,” who are about 20 million Android users in Italy, and the duration of the violation that “is still ongoing for those who did not update the application and those who had previously given the system permission,” as well as “the lack of (meta) cooperation during the investigation.”
The value of the fine represents about 0.4 percent of the group’s annual revenues, which amounted to $201 billion in 2025, while its net profits amounted to $60.5 billion.
Microsoft announced today, Saturday, that the services of Teams, Outlook, CoPilot, and others have fully returned to normal, ending a global outage that disrupted online communications for companies and government agencies for more than 24 hours.
The company wrote on the “X” platform: “We have completed our efforts to address the basic problem behind this incident and have restored service to customers and the remaining areas that were affected by the outage.”
In light of the widespread technical paralysis that struck Microsoft's cloud services and communication systems and affected millions of users, companies, and government agencies around the world, an additional danger has emerged that is no less dangerous than the failure itself. Electronic fraud networks were quick to exploit the prevailing state of confusion and panic.
With the disruption of vital platforms such as Outlook and Teams, hackers intensified their phone and email phishing attempts, offering false promises to repair accounts or providing quick alternative paths to overcome the crisis, with the aim of stealing sensitive data and hacking personal and institutional accounts. This reality puts technology users before a real test of the importance of vigilance and relying exclusively on official channels, avoiding falling into the trap of fake promises that trade their digital security for flimsy promises of a solution.
Leonid Bezverchenko, chief security researcher at Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team GReAT, confirms that the outage of Microsoft 365 services on November 12 and 13, 2026, which caused the platform’s business tools to be disabled, created a state of confusion and urgency, conditions that fraudsters are quick to exploit. Employees and customers become more likely to trust messages that appear to offer updates, workarounds, or quick ways to regain access to services when normal communication channels stop working. For organizations that have not implemented cybersecurity solutions capable of blocking malicious redirects or detecting unusual network activity, this situation can develop into a much more serious threat than just a temporary delay in workflow.
Threat actors can exploit incidents of this type in several ways, including sending fraudulent emails or text messages impersonating Microsoft or internal technical support teams, sending fake notifications to reset passwords, circulating fake links to restore services, or directing users to fake login pages aimed at stealing their credentials and MultiFactor Authentication (MFA) codes.
Another possible scenario is for attackers to impersonate technical support staff via phone calls to request remote access to the user's computer, or to spread fake updates on the status of services via social media platforms, personal email, or messaging applications. A simple request like “re-authenticate” or “verify your account” may seem reliable during an actual outage because it is in line with what the user would expect to see in such circumstances.
Organizations should direct employees and customers to one official, trusted source for updates, warn them of unsolicited support requests, and emphasize that official service providers will never ask for passwords, MFA codes, or grant remote access without prior approval.
Security teams must also monitor impersonation attempts, move quickly to block counterfeit domains whenever possible, and ensure that technical support staff adhere to strict verification procedures. As for users, it is good practice to use reliable anti-virus solutions to ensure that these fraudulent attempts are alerted and protected against them.
