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In September 2022, Cloudflare open-sourced its Workers runtime under the name 'workerd' with an Apache 2.0 license, making the core of its serverless computing platform freely available. This allowed developers to run the same runtime locally and in production, and contributed to the broader open-source ecosystem. The project is actively maintained on GitHub.

Beyond Meat's Chief Operating Officer Doug Ramsey was arrested on September 17, 2022 for biting a man's nose and making terroristic threats during a road rage incident outside a University of Arkansas football game. Beyond Meat suspended Ramsey immediately and he departed the company on October 14, 2022. Days later, chief supply chain officer Bernie Adcock also resigned.

In September 2022, EVGA shocked the PC hardware industry by announcing it would end its decades-long partnership with NVIDIA and stop manufacturing graphics cards entirely. CEO Andrew Han stated it was 'a principled decision, not a financial decision,' citing NVIDIA withholding information about products, cutting GPU prices without warning, limiting retail pricing, and squeezing AIB partner margins to approximately 5% while NVIDIA maintained 65% gross margins. EVGA chose not to partner with AMD or Intel as alternatives.

In September 2022, Cloudflare blocked the Kiwi Farms harassment forum after a sustained campaign targeting trans streamer Clara Sorrenti (Keffals), which included swatting, doxxing, and credible death threats. Cloudflare initially resisted calls to drop the site, but reversed course citing an 'unprecedented emergency' and 'imminent threat to human life.'

In September 2022, SoftBank Group Corp began laying off employees at its loss-making Vision Fund, cutting at least 30% of staff. The layoffs came after the Vision Fund posted a record 3.5 trillion yen ($27.4 billion) loss for the fiscal year ending March 2022. The cuts reflected the consequences of Son's high-risk investment strategy failing, with workers bearing the cost of leadership's poor decisions.

In September 2022, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unilaterally refused to enable Starlink connectivity near Crimea during a planned Ukrainian drone attack on Russian naval forces, fearing escalation into a 'major act of war.' This decision, made by a private citizen controlling critical military communications infrastructure, raised serious concerns about private power over geopolitical affairs. The Pentagon subsequently questioned whether future military contracts need explicit terms preventing service denial. Reports also emerged of Russian forces illegally acquiring and using Starlink terminals, which SpaceX was aware of but allegedly failed to prevent.

In September 2022, Elon Musk refused a Ukrainian government request to activate Starlink coverage to Sevastopol, Crimea, which would have enabled a drone submarine attack on the Russian naval fleet. Musk stated enabling it would make SpaceX 'explicitly complicit in a major act of war.' This decision by a private company effectively determined the outcome of a military operation, raising concerns about unprecedented private control over critical wartime infrastructure. The incident was revealed in Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography.

In late 2022, Musk secretly ordered engineers not to enable Starlink satellite connectivity near the Crimean coast, disrupting a Ukrainian submarine drone attack on the Russian naval fleet. The drones lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly. Musk said he feared Russia would respond with nuclear weapons. Ukrainian officials begged him to restore service. Musk claimed Starlink was never active over Crimea and that Ukraine made an 'emergency request' to activate it to Sevastopol. The incident highlighted the risks of one individual controlling critical military communications infrastructure.

In multiple 2022 interviews, Midjourney founder and CEO David Holz openly admitted that the company trained its AI on 'hundreds of millions' of existing artworks and photographs scraped from the internet without consent from creators. Holz stated they 'grab everything they can, dump it in a huge file, and set it on fire to train some huge thing.' When asked about seeking consent, Holz said 'There isn't really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from.' He argued the process was 'kind of like a search engine' and compared it to how humans learn, claiming existing law doesn't specifically address this. Midjourney later confirmed it made $300 million in 2024 using these models.

In 2021, DuckDuckGo launched its Email Protection service, providing users with a free @duck.com email address that strips tracking pixels and hidden trackers from incoming emails before forwarding them. The service extended DuckDuckGo's privacy mission beyond search into email communications.

On August 23, 2022, Yelp began adding consumer warnings to crisis pregnancy center listings, noting they 'typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite' and 'do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers.' Yelp evaluated 55,000+ reproductive health service pages, recategorizing 1,300+ as crisis pregnancy centers. Texas AG Ken Paxton later sued Yelp over the labels; Yelp counter-sued asserting First Amendment rights.

In August 2022, Mostaque led Stability AI's release of Stable Diffusion as open source under Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license, making source code and model weights publicly available. Unlike proprietary models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion runs on consumer hardware with as little as 2.4GB VRAM. Mostaque stated goal was to 'end corporate control and dominance over such technologies' and democratize AI. Model adoption spread across digital marketing, e-commerce, fintech, and cybersecurity. Stability AI built developer communities with 20,000+ members. License prohibited crime, harassment, doxing, exploiting minors, and discrimination while giving users commercial rights to output.

President Yoon Suk Yeol pardoned Lee Jae-yong on August 15, 2022, citing Samsung's importance to 'overcoming the national economic crisis.' The pardon ended Lee's 5-year ban on holding formal Samsung positions, allowing him to become Executive Chairman. Civic groups criticized the pardon as 'cozying up to chaebol' and sending a message that 'they are free to commit all the crimes they want.'

In August 2022, Meta launched BlenderBot 3 as a public demo chatbot. The system made false statements about Facebook's data privacy practices and incorrectly claimed Donald Trump won the 2020 election. The chatbot also made statements on other sensitive political topics without factual basis. Meta faced backlash for releasing the chatbot publicly with insufficient safety testing and fact-checking mechanisms.

On August 8, 2022 GitHub removed the Tornado Cash open-source repositories and suspended developer accounts including those of US person Roman Storm following the US Treasury OFAC's August 8, 2022 sanctioning of the protocol's smart contracts. EFF, Coin Center and free-speech advocates argued GitHub's takedown went beyond legal requirements - sanctions targeted the protocol addresses, not the code, and US precedent (Bernstein v. DOJ) treats source code as protected speech. GitHub reinstated some repositories in archive-only mode in September 2022 after sustained criticism.

In 2022, the Colombian Labor Ministry launched a probe investigating Rappi for its approach to health and safety of workers, and over whether the company violated local laws by refusing to negotiate with the union UNIDAPP. The investigation followed election of Colombia's first leftist president. Workers earn as little as $7 for 17-hour days, with 68.7% working 7 days/week averaging 10 hours/day according to Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

In June 2022, Nomad introduced inadequately tested code that included a significant vulnerability. Just over a month later on August 1, 2022, hackers exploited the vulnerability, resulting in the theft of approximately $186 million in cryptocurrency (Ethereum, USDC, DAI, WBTC). The company was able to recover some funds, but consumers ultimately lost approximately $100 million. Despite prominently marketing itself as offering 'security-first' services, Nomad failed to use secure coding practices, implement vulnerability reporting processes, or deploy widely accepted security measures like circuit breakers or kill switches. The company had been warned about the dangers of inadequate testing and staffing but failed to implement basic safety measures. The FTC settlement in December 2025 required $37.5M restitution and a comprehensive security program.

In June-August 2022, Marc Andreessen and wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote to Atherton Town Council expressing 'IMMENSE objection' to multifamily overlay zones, claiming they would 'MASSIVELY decrease our home values' and 'IMMENSELY increase noise pollution and traffic.' The town's proposal included only 58 multifamily units to meet state requirements for 348 new housing units. After Andreessen and 300+ residents submitted negative feedback, the town removed the multifamily rezoning feature. This contradicted Andreessen's 2020 essay 'It's Time to Build' where he identified lack of housing as the reason for skyrocketing Bay Area home prices.

In 2022, Meta complied with a Nebraska law enforcement warrant to release private Facebook messages between a mother and her teenage daughter regarding abortion pills. The messages were used as evidence to prosecute Jessica Burgess, who was sentenced to two years in prison. The case highlighted tech companies' failure to protect reproductive health data from law enforcement despite public pledges to support employee abortion access.

Plaid agreed in August 2022 to a $58 million class-action settlement resolving claims that it collected and stored more banking-account data than users authorized when granting connection permissions to fintech apps. The settlement also required Plaid to delete certain stored data and improve transparency about what is collected. The settlement followed the DOJ-blocked $5.3B Visa acquisition (abandoned January 2021), in which the DOJ argued Plaid was a unique competitive threat in financial-data plumbing.

Following the 2018 crunch controversy and Dan Houser's departure in 2020, Rockstar made documented improvements. According to Bloomberg's 2022 investigation interviewing 20+ current and recent employees: the design department was restructured, scheduling improved, temp contractors converted to full-time, and 'flexitime' policies let staff take time off for extra hours worked. Employees described it as 'a boys' club transformed into a real company' with 'morale across the company higher than it's ever been.'

In July 2022, DeepMind expanded the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database from roughly 1 million to over 200 million protein structures covering nearly every known protein on Earth, partnering with EMBL-EBI. The database is freely available under a CC-BY-4.0 license for academic and commercial use. Over 2 million researchers in 190+ countries have used it, potentially saving hundreds of millions of years of research time.

On July 21, 2022 the Cyberspace Administration of China announced an 8.026 billion yuan ($1.2B) fine against DiDi Global for violations of China's Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law, citing 16 violations including illegal collection of facial recognition data, passenger personal information and clipboard data. The fine followed a year-long data security review that began days after DiDi's June 2021 NYSE IPO and forced the company to delist from US markets in 2022.

Khan Academy created a dedicated Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging role, hiring Dr. Sam Kline in 2022 and also employing Erica Coffey as Director of DEIB. The organization committed to anti-racism in hiring processes, design principles, and content creation. Content is translated into 80+ languages. Accessibility features include screen reader support, reduced motion settings, and multiple learning modalities. The platform explicitly designs for learners with varying abilities and commits to equal employment regardless of protected characteristics.

As chairman of Twitter's board, Bret Taylor led the company's response after Elon Musk attempted to terminate his agreed $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in mid-2022. Taylor directed Twitter's lawsuit to force Musk to close the deal at the originally agreed price and led the ensuing legal wrangling, which the New York Times described as Taylor 'squaring up' to Musk ahead of a scheduled Delaware trial. Facing the prospect of losing in court, Musk reversed course in October 2022 and completed the acquisition at the original price, an outcome widely attributed to Taylor's board leadership enforcing the contractual deal on behalf of Twitter's shareholders.

In July 2022, The Guardian and ICIJ published the 'Uber Files' — 124,000+ leaked internal documents revealing how Uber secretly lobbied world leaders including French President Macron, evaded police during raids, and deliberately flouted laws in dozens of countries to force its way into new markets. The documents showed CEO Travis Kalanick personally directed aggressive expansion tactics and that the company treated driver violence as a tool to generate public sympathy for deregulation.

In July 2022, the Guardian published the 'Uber Files' - over 124,000 leaked documents showing how Uber under Kalanick aggressively broke laws, secretly lobbied governments, and exploited violence against drivers to gain public sympathy. The files revealed direct communications from Kalanick directing operations in cities where Uber was operating illegally.

In July 2022, a Kenyan High Court froze accounts holding $43 million after the Assets Recovery Agency alleged accounts 'were used as conduits for money laundering.' Total frozen funds exceeded $200 million. In June 2023, another freeze covered 45 bank accounts following a petition by 2,000+ investors claiming Flutterwave helped defraud them of $12 million. Kenya cleared the company in November 2023 and released $52.5 million.

In July 2022, following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Stewart Butterfield and his wife Jen Rubio announced they would match up to $1 million in donations to the National Network of Abortion Funds.

In July 2022, following the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Google announced it would automatically delete user location history for visits to abortion clinics, fertility clinics, and other sensitive locations. Google also added an option for Fitbit users to bulk delete menstruation data, and updated Google Maps to only show actual abortion providers for 'abortion clinics near me' searches, filtering out crisis pregnancy centers.