Axios

Ed Baker, Uber's head of product and growth, is leaving the company, as Recode first reported and Axios has confirmed.

"I have always wanted to apply my experience in technology and growth to the public sector. And now seems like the right moment to get involved," Baker wrote in an email to his team, according to Recode. Marketplace head Daniel Graf will become acting head of product and growth, with Peter Deng and Aaron Schildkrout helping as leaders of rider and driver products, respectively.

Questionable behavior at Uber: Baker's resignation comes at a time of turmoil for the company, which recently kicked off an internal investigation after a former employee alleged sexual harassment and discrimination in a blog post. Baker himself reportedly was "making out" with another employee during a company offsite in Miami three years ago ago, according to an anonymous tip sent to board member Arianna Huffington, which Recode also obtained. Huffington is part of the team leading the investigation. Uber declined to comment on this situation.

On Monday, Uber asked its newly hired VP of engineering, Amit Singhal, to resign after it found out he had been accused of sexual harassment while at his previous job at Google in late 2015.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Baker's Miami encounter took place three weeks ago instead of three years ago.

Uber's toxic work culture may not be limited to its male bosses. Keala Lusk, a former Uber software engineer says in a blog post that her female manager treated her unfairly and even commented on the way she dresses.

Unlike all of the other Uber stories I have read, I wasn't dealing with some white guy in power. This is a woman, just like me. Like all of the other stories, nothing changed even after multiple meetings with my manager and HR. It was simply brushed aside and swept under the carpet of collective Uber suffering.

Lusk joined Uber in April of 2016, according to her LinkedIn profile, and it's unclear when she left the company.

Her blog post comes less than two weeks after another former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler Rigetti, wrote of her own experiences, including allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. Uber has since enlisted former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to lead an investigation into the claims as well as Uber's overall work culture.

Update: "We take any and all allegations of this nature very seriously and have forwarded this to Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran to include in their investigation," an Uber spokesperson told Axios.

Recode reports today that Amazon is working on Alexa-powered devices that use the popular digital assistant to make phone calls and serve as an intercom system, citing people familiar with the company's plans.

Key context: As Recode points out, Amazon's Echo products have been among the most talked about consumer tech products in the past year, but neither Amazon nor rivals Apple or Google have cracked the code on how to make voice apps a daily habit. Making Alexa a better communicator could help Amazon be even more ingrained into consumers' everyday lives.

Why it matters: Amazon is on the quest to make Alexa and Echo the center of how consumers live, shop and work. The company has stiff competition from Google and Apple, who are also putting tremendous resources into owning the connected home via voice-activated digital assistants.

Charlie Miller, one of the two hackers who made headlines by hacking cars like a Jeep, is leaving Uber after a year and a half, he announced on Twitter on Friday. He plans to reveal his next move next week, he also said.

Miller and fellow car hacker Chris Valasek joined Uber in August 2015 as part of the company's newly established Advanced Technology Center in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University. The division focuses on technology areas such as mapping, safety, and self-driving cars. Prior to Uber, Miller spent three years at Twitter.

The losses show just how bad Amazon Web Services S3 outage was earlier this week, financially speaking. Cyence, an economic modeling platform, shared some data with Axios that show the ramifications:

• Losses of $150 million for S&P 500 companies
• Losses of $160 million for U.S. financial services companies using the infrastructure

Clearly the four-hour outage was more than just an inconvenience for web publishers.

European Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova tells Bloomberg that the bloc would consider suspending its Privacy Shield agreement with the United States if it felt the U.S. wasn't standing by its part of the bargain:

"I will not hesitate to do it. There's too much at stake."

Why it matters: The deal calms fears in Europe about privacy violations and eases the way for companies to store user data in a country other than the one where the user lives. But language in one of President Trump's executive orders has some worried that the administration could undermine the privacy rights of foreign nationals.

What's next: Bloomberg reports Jourova has a trip to Washington in the works for later this month. She said it would take a "significant change" to see the deal suspended.

Spotify, the Swedish music streaming service, says it now has 50 million paying subscribers, up from 40 million in September. In June, it said it had 100 million total monthly users, including those on the ad-supported free version of its service.

The competition: In contrast, Apple Music (which only offers a paid service) only has 20 million as of December. However, it's important to note that while Spotify has been around since 2008, while Apple Music debuted in June 2015. Other services like SoundCloud and Amazon Prime Music don't disclose specific subscriber numbers.

It's been nearly three months since Uber battled with California's Department of Motor Vehicles over the company's lack of a permit to test self-driving cars on public roads. Now Uber will finally apply for one.

In December, when Uber began testing a fleet of autonomous Volvos in San Francisco, the DMV revoked the cars' registration after the ride-hailing giant refused to apply for a permit. At the time, Uber argued that its cars didn't fit the agency's definition of self-driving (because they had human "monitors" in the vehicles) and therefore shouldn't need a permit (the DMV disagrees, of course). The cars' registrations have already been reinstated, although the vehicles won't go into self-driving mode until the permit is issued, Uber tells Axios:

These cars are legally registered and are being driven manually. We are taking steps to complete our application to apply for a DMV testing permit. As we said in December, Uber remains 100 percent committed to California.

Uber also is testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh and Arizona.

Amazon offered up an explanation for this week's major outage in its AWS service, blaming human error and promising to change its procedures to avoid a similar incident.

The outage, Amazon said, was caused while trying to remove a small number of servers. A command was incorrectly entered by an employee, resulting in more servers than expected to be taken offline and requiring the overall system to be fully rebooted.

We want to apologize for the impact this event caused for our customers. While we are proud of our long track record of availability with Amazon S3, we know how critical this service is to our customers, their applications and end users, and their businesses. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to improve our availability even further.

Amazon said it is making a number of changes, including safeguards that should prevent too many servers from being taken offline.