| COLONIAL PAID UP: Colonial Pipeline paid almost $5 million in ransom to hackers last Friday despite reports that said the company had no intention of paying, Bloomberg news reported. Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the company paid in untraceable cryptocurrency within hours of the attack. After the hackers received the payment, they provided the operator with a decrypting tool to restore its computer network. However, one of the people said the tool was so slow that the company continued to use its own backups to help restore its system. Colonial declined to comment to The Hill. President Biden declined to comment when asked by a reporter on Thursday whether he was briefed on the company's decision to pay the ransom. Read more about the payment here. PELOSI WEIGHS IN: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Thursday that private firms should reject hackers' demands for ransoms, just hours after reports emerged that a major energy company had paid almost $5 million to help restore service following a crippling ransomware attack. Pelosi emphasized that she had no window into the internal management deliberations of the Colonial Pipeline Company, a private firm that runs a massive, 5,500-mile network of petroleum pipelines from the Gulf Coast to the major population centers on the East Coast. But when asked if firms should pay out such ransoms, she didn't hesitate. "No," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. "The point is that we don't want people to think that there's money in it for them to threaten the security of a critical infrastructure in our country." Read more about her comments here. IN OTHER NEWS… RIDESHARE WOES: Demand for ridesharing services is beginning to pick back up as Americans get vaccinated against coronavirus, but many eager riders are running into the same problem: a lack of drivers. Both Uber and Lyft have acknowledged the mismatch between demand for rides and supply of drivers, which is resulting in longer waits and higher fares for consumers. Uber has announced that it is investing $250 million into bringing back past, and recruiting new, drivers. A spokesperson for Lyft told The Hill that the company is “working to meet demand, including providing incentives to drivers, who are busier and earning more than they were even before the pandemic." Despite those economic incentives and verbal commitments to protect workers from COVID-19, many drivers remain hesitant to start giving rides again. Multiple workers who stopped driving during the pandemic told The Hill in interviews that going back is not worth it for them without bigger changes to how the companies operate. Read more. FOR HIRE: Amazon announced Thursday that it is looking to hire 75,000 more employees across the U.S. and Canada. The e-commerce giant also said it will offer a $100 bonus to new hires who show proof of vaccination against COVID-19. "We look forward to hiring 75,000 associates across our fulfillment and transportation network," said Alicia Boler Davis, vice president of global customer fulfillment at Amazon. The new positions will have an average starting pay of $17 an hour, the company said in a blog post. Read more about the hiring effort here. CUTTING TIES: Apple has cut ties with a controversial new hire after internal pushback from employees over comments the ads engineer made in his book, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to multiple outlets. Apple employees circulated a petition Wednesday demanding an investigation into the hiring of Antonio García Martínez despite his “overly racist and sexist remarks” about former colleagues in his 2016 book, “Chaos Monkeys.” García Martínez has left the company after a few weeks in the new job, an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg News. “At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted,” an Apple spokesman told Bloomberg. “Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.” Read more here. INSTA UPDATES: Instagram users will now be able to list their preferred pronouns on their profiles, with the image-sharing app allowing for up to four pronouns to be displayed, it announced this week. Users can change pronouns at any time and can also set it up so only followers can see theirs. If a user is under 18 years old, then pronouns will be hidden from nonfollowers as a default. "We are giving people more tools to express themselves on Instagram," a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told Mashable. "Sharing pronouns has been widely adopted by our community, and with this feature we hope to normalize the adoption further." Read more here. | 
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