A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday.
Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal.
Other platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information.
New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load.
Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, provides internet infrastructure that protects websites from online threats and helps them run more smoothly.
Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of its Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage.
And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms.
Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
Meta Platforms has been spending too aggressively on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and that will affect the tech giant’s profitability, according to a new investor note from Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson.
The note, published on Tuesday, points out that Metas stock price (Nasdaq: META) has fallen almost 20% over the past month or so, exacerbated by its most recent earnings results, which were released on October 29.
MoffettNathanson has been a staunch defender of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, even when its shares have dipped in the past. But on Tuesday, analysts at the firm wrote, we were obviously too complacent in our investment advice.”
Why is Meta spending so much on AI?
Meta along with fellow Big Tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet are in a high-stakes race to build out infrastructure and invest in the talent they see as necessary to compete in a world being transformed by generative AI.
However, investors and many experts have expressed concerns that we may be in an AI bubble similar to the one seen during the dotcom era. So the question is whether these investments will pay off in the long run.
To be crystal clear, we feel that this time is different and that defending the stock even at this level is harder because of the ramping of the massive incremental bet that Meta, without a cloud business or pre-existing enterprise assets, has been making in building out a Meta Superintelligence business, the note says. Given the outlook, the issue from here is that even with strong top-line expectations, Q4 and 2026 margins will likely compress.
In other words, MoffettNathansons team feels that Meta is overspending on AI, and it could come back to bite investors. Despite the relatively harsh words, the firm still rates Meta’s stock as a buy, though it has adjusted its price target, dropping it from $875 to $750.
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Meta, and much of tech overall, has significantly increased its capital expenditures in the wake of the AI revolution.
But according to the note, Meta is “trying to punch above its weight” when compared to its peers. Although the company is spending a similar amount on AI infrastructure, it does not have a cloud platform like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, the analysts point out.
MoffettNathanson projects that Meta’s capex-to-revenue ratio will hit 47% next year. By comparison, Microsofts is 29%, Alphabets is 26%, and Amazons is 16%, MoffettNathanson estimates.
Meta lacks a comparable coherent pathway for monetizing GenAI directly, the firm says.
Shares of Meta are trending downward this week along with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite as investors await tomorrow’s highly anticipated earnings report from AI chip giant Nvidia. Meta shares are down roughly 2% year to date.
At Microsofts Ignite conference on November 18, the company unveiled new AI-powered software features designed to make coders lives easierincluding a tool to automatically fix security issues as new vulnerabilities are discovered.
Over this past year, the nature of being a software engineer has really started to change, says Amanda Silver, corporate vice president and head of product for apps and agents at Microsoft. And our focus has been on tackling the most miserable, soul-draining parts of the job and really transforming them, so that developers can kind of bring joy back to their day-to-day lives.
One result of that effort is an AI offering, now in public preview, that combines the runtime application protection of Microsoft Defender for Cloud with GitHub Advanced Securitys protection for source code to spot and help fix a variety of security vulnerabilities. When Microsoft Defender for Cloud detects that an app on the Microsoft Azure cloud system has a security issue, perhaps based on information from a published vulnerability report, that knowledge can be channeled into Microsoft-owned GitHub, to help set up what’s called a security campaign. Thats a GitHub feature designed for a coordinated effort to tackle security holes. Once its set up, GitHubs AI Copilot Autofix tool can automatically suggest code changes to address the issue.
The developer doesn’t have to write the code to respond to the issue, Silver says. Rather, GitHub Copilot actually issues the pull request, and the developer just has to review and accept it.
Even when the problem is caused by a security flaw in third-party code, like an open-source library, Copilot can help in upgrading to a later edition of the library without the bug and help with code changes required for compatibility with the new version.
The announcement follows the May debut of Azure SRE Agent, another AI tool designed to spot and help analyze certain security issues and other problems, assisting engineers in quickly finding and fixing the causes of incidents affecting cloud systems. Its one of a number of AI tools recently released by various companies that can flag problems and help engineers comb through the often-voluminous log files generated by applications, operating systems, and other software to understand the root cause, ideally before an issue becomes urgent.
Nobody joined the industry because they want to be woken up in the middle of the night because they’re on a live site incident call, says Silver.
And for developers building software designed to itself integrate with artificial intelligence to process data or answer user questions, deciding which AI model is best suited for a particular task can be a complex question, particularly when considering factors like speed and cost as well as accuracy. To help address that challenge, Microsoft also on November 18 unveiled what it calls the Model Router in Azure AI Foundry, which automatically dispatches particular AI prompts to an appropriate model in real time as an app runs. Smaller (and cheaper) models can be used when theyll likely do the trick, while bigger and more costly models can be used for more complex scenarios, with reasoning models invoked for tasks requiring their skills.
Microsoft has also been working on ways to help businesses upgrade aging code and move older applications to the cloud. Its another notoriously tedious task that AI programming assistants like GitHub Copilot can help automate.
Internally, Microsoft reports, units including the Xbox team have used GitHub Copilot to help modernize code, at times dramatically cutting the developer effort required. And a new offering also unveiled November 18, called Managed Instance on Azure App Service, makes it easier for developers to move code to the cloud with fewer tweaks in the first place, by providing closer compatibility with older Microsoft software.
That, along with AI help in ultimately making further upgrades, should help stave off burnout as developers dodge the tedious tasks of getting aging code to run on todays cloud systems, Silver says.
No engineer really joined the industry to get assigned a months-long refactoring job of doing thankless migration work, Silver says. That’s the kind of developer toil that really quietly drains morale, and it burns out great teams and great engineers.
Growth in U.S. markets helped Swedish fintech firm Klarna to achieve a 26% jump in third-quarter revenue, beating expectations in its first report as a public company and forecasting revenue above $1 billion in the current quarter, the company said on Tuesday.
The buy now, pay later lender, which went public in September in New York, reported revenue of $903 million, beating analysts’ expectations of $882 million, according to data compiled by LSEG.
“To a large degree, AI is accelerating our ability to ship new features and products,” CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Reuters.
Klarna had been an early adopter of AI and used the technology to help customers and merchants cut jobs, create marketing campaigns, and improve products.
However, Siemiatkowski expressed some nervousness about the huge spending on building data centres.
While there will be an uptick in demand for AI in both the consumer space and enterprises, there will be more compression of data in businesses, hitting future compute demand, he said.
Tech companies have announced massive spending plans this year for building data centres as they expect AI to fuel demand.
Klarna’s gross merchandise volume (GMV), a commonly used e-commerce metric for measuring sales, rose 23% to $32.7 billion in the quarter.
In the U.S., Klarnas largest market, GMV grew 43% and revenue rose 51%.
Active customers rose 32% to 114 million from a year ago.
The company, however, reported a net loss of $95 million, compared with a profit of $12 million in the year-ago period, which it said was partly due to a shift to U.S. accounting principles following its New York listing.
In the current quarter, the company expects revenue of $1.07 billion, compared with expectations of $1.06 billion.
Supantha Mukherjee, Reuters
The U.S. stock market is slipping again on Tuesday, following a global sell-off, as Nvidia, bitcoin and other Wall Street stars keep falling on worries that their prices shot too high. Home Depot is also dragging the market lower after saying it made less in profit during the summer than analysts expected.
The S&P 500 dipped 0.4%, following up on sharp swings the last couple weeks, and pulled further from its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 373 points, or 0.8%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.6% lower.
The struggles are a sharp turnaround from the months of relentless rallying for the U.S. stock market since April, when it sold off after President Donald Trump shocked the world with stiff tariffs. That rally, though, was so strong that critics said it may have carried stock prices too high, too fast and left the market at risk of a sharp drop. They pointed in particular to stocks swept up in the mania around artificial-intelligence technology, which have been surging at spectacular speeds.
Many big investors still seem to be expecting stock prices to rise further, according to the latest monthly survey of global fund managers by Bank of America Global Research. But when asked what the No. 1 risk for the market is, one with a lower probability of happening but a high chance of damage, 45% pointed to an AI bubble. That beat out trouble in the bond market, inflation and trade wars.
The highest net percentage of investors in 20 years are also saying companies are overinvesting, according to the survey. The worry is that all the investment pouring into AI chips and data centers worldwide may not produce the kind of revolution that proponents have been predicting, or at least not as profitable a one.
Fervent demand for Nvidias AI chips have made it into Wall Streets most valuable stock, and it briefly topped $5 trillion in value after more than doubling in four of the past five years. But the chip companys 1.8% drop on Tuesday means its down 9.5% for the month so far.
Other high-flying areas of the market with their own evangelists have also been struggling lately. Bitcoins price briefly fell below $90,000 during the morning, down from nearly $125,000 last month.
Home Depot helped drag the market lower after falling 3.4%. It reported a weaker profit for the summer than analysts expected and cited a variety of reasons. Chief among them was a lack of storms, which would have driven customers to buy more home-improvement supplies. But CEO Ted Decker also pointed to consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing for preventing an expected increase in demand from happening.
Reporting stronger profits is one of the ways a company can make its stock price look less expensive, because stock prices tend to track with earnings over the long term.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Cloudflare fell 2.8% after an issue at the internet infrastructure provider caused global outages for ChatGPT and other services.
In the bond market, Treasury yields eased. The yield on the 10-year Treasury sank to 4.10% from 4.13% late Monday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes tumbled across Europe and Asia, following up on Wall Streets losses on Monday.
Japans Nikkei 225 dropped 3.2% after feeling extra pressure from a jump in Japanese government bond yields, reflecting rising risks as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi prepares to boost government spending and push back the timetable for bringing down Japans huge national debt.
South Koreas Kospi sank 3.3%, and Frances CAC 40 fell 1.8% for two of the larger drops worldwide.
Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
Roblox is stepping up its age verification system for users who want to privately message other players and implementing age-based chats so kids, teens, and adults will only be able to message people around their own age.
The moves come as the popular gaming platform continues to face criticism and lawsuits over child safety and a growing number of states and countries are implementing age verification laws.
The company had previously announced the age estimation tool, which is provided by a company called Persona, in July. It requires players to take a video selfie that will be used to estimate their age. Roblox says the videos are deleted after the age check is processed. Users are not required to submit a face scan to use the platform, only if they want to chat with other users.
Roblox doesnt allow kids under 13 to chat with other users outside of games unless they have explicit parental permissionand unlike different platforms, it does not encrypt private chat conversations, so it can monitor and moderate them.
While some experts have expressed caution about the reliability of facial age estimation tools, Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer at Roblox, said that between the ages of about five to 25, the system can accurately estimate a person’s age within one or two years.
But of course, theres always people who may be well outside of a traditional bell curve. And in those cases, if you disagree with the estimate that comes back, then you can provide an ID or use parental consent in order to correct that, he said.
After users go through the age checks, they will be assigned to age groups ranging from under nine, nine to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20 and over 21. Users will then be able to chat with their age group or similar age groups, depending on their age and the type of chat.
Roblox said it will start enforcing age checks in Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands in the first week of December and the rest of the world in early January.
A growing number of tech companies are implementing verification systems to comply with regulations or ward off criticism that they are not protecting children. This includes Google, which recently started testing a new age-verification system for YouTube that relies on AI to differentiate between adults and minors based on their watch histories. Instagram is testing an AI system to determine if kids are lying about their ages.
Barbara Ortutay, AP technology writer
Home Depot‘s third-quarter was mixed with fewer violent storms reaching shore, more anxiety among U.S. consumers, and a housing market that is in a deep funk.
The company lowered its fiscal 2025 adjusted earnings forecast but raised its expectations for sales growth.
For the three months ended Nov. 2, Home Depot earned $3.6 billion, or $3.62 per share. A year earlier, it earned $3.65 billion, or $3.67 per share.
Removing one-time charges and benefits, earnings were $3.74 per share, a dime short of Wall Street expectations, according to a poll by FactSet.
It is the third consecutive quarter that Home Depot, an overperformer in recent years, has missed profit expectations.
Home Depot’s stock declined more than 3% before the opening bell Tuesday. Shares of rival Lowe’s, which will report its quarterly results on Wednesday, fell more than 2%.
Our results missed our expectations primarily due to the lack of storms in the third quarter, which resulted in greater than expected pressure in certain categories, CEO Ted Decker said in a statement. Additionally, while underlying demand in the business remained relatively stable sequentially, an expected increase in demand in the third quarter did not materialize. We believe that consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing are disproportionately impacting home improvement demand.
Revenue for the Atlanta company rose to $41.35 billion from $40.22 billion, topping Wall Street projections of $41.15 billion.
Sales at stores open at least a year, a key gauge of a retailers health, increased 0.2%. In the U.S., comparable store sales edged up 0.1%.
Customer transactions fell 1.4% in the quarter. The amount shoppers spent rose to $90.39 per average receipt from $88.65 in the year-ago period.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, said that Home Depot’s quarter was negatively impacted by external factors, not missteps made by the company. Americans who have grown more anxious over the economy were were definitely a contributor, he said.
The summer months were particularly challenging in this regard as consumers were actively making choices over how to spend their money, and home improvement took something of a back seat to experiences, travel, and personal indulgences, he said.
Home Depot now anticipates fiscal 2025 adjusted earnings will decline approximately 5% from fiscal 2024s $15.24 per share. It previously expected adjusted earnings would fall about 2% from its results in the prior fiscal year.
The chain now foresees fiscal 2025 sales growth of about 3%. Its prior forecast was for sales growth of approximately 2.8%. The company predicts comparable sales growth will be slightly positive. Previously, it predicted comparable sales growth of about 1%.
In August, Home Depot said that shoppers should expect modest price increases in some categories as a result of rising tariff costs, though they wouldnt be broad-based. Company executives told analysts during its earnings call then that more than 50% of its products are sourced domestically and wouldnt be subject to any tariffs.
Home Depots results come as the U.S. housing slump drags on, with the countrys home turnover rate at the lowest level in decades. About 28 out of every 1,000 homes changed hands between January and September, the lowest U.S. home turnover rate going back to at least the 1990s, according to an analysis by Redfin.
The home turnover rate represents the number of homes sold, divided by the total number of existing sellable properties. While sales data show whether more or fewer homes are selling in a given period, the home turnover rate helps illustrate how homeowners are staying put longer.
The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, the year mortgage rates began climbing from historic lows that fueled a homebuying frenzy at the start of this decade.
Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said on Monday he will step back from all public commitments, days after President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate his and other prominent Democrats’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Summers, a former president of Harvard University, where he is a professor, told the university’s student newspaper that the move was to allow him “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
The announcement came after the House Oversight Committee released thousands of files related to Epstein last week, including documents that showed personal correspondence between Summers and Epstein.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein, Summers told The Crimson.
“While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort,” Summers added.
Summers, a Democrat, served as former President Bill Clinton‘s Treasury Secretary and former President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council director. He currently serves on the board of OpenAI and as a director of the Harvard Kennedy Schools Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
OpenAI and Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Summers also did not immediately respond.
The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trumps side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters.
Many Trump voters believe Bondi and other Trump officials have covered up Epsteins ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on forcing the release of investigative Epstein files after Trump, who had initially opposed the vote, called on fellow Republicans to support it.
Jasper Ward, Reuters
Over the last decade, dozens of cities have reshaped streets around cycling and slower, safer, healthier travel. Take Paris: at rush hour, boulevards that were once packed with cars are now filled with thousands of people on bikes, newly planted trees, and cleaner air.
In a detailed new analysis, the urban design consultancy Copenhagenize ranked 100 global cities on how far they’ve come to make it easier to bikeexamining everything from changes in bike infrastructure to whether cities are promoting cargo bikes for delivery and teaching kids to bike in school.
Nearly all top-ranked cities are in Europe, where strong pro-bike policies have lowered speed limits, added separated bike lanes, and created new bicycle streets where bikes take priority over cars. But the benchmarking report, the most comprehensive of its kind, also looks at progress in cities worldwide, from Nairobi, Kenyawhere “bike trains” of hundreds of riders make commuting by bike saferto Minneapolis, where some car lanes have been converted to two-way bike paths.
If any politicians have doubts about adding new bike infrastructure, “they can look at this report and see that everywhere in the world, other cities are investing in cycling, and they are getting back all the benefits from active mobility,” says Clotilde Imbert, director of Copenhagenize. Cities like Paris show that massive changes can happen fast. “If you want to transform your city quickly, you can,” says Imbert. For the full breakdown, see the reportbut here’s a snapshot of the top 30 cities for cyclists.
[Photo: Konstantinos/Adobe Stock]
1. Utrecht, Netherlands
In the index’s top-ranked city, nearly a third of all trips happen by bike. The Dutch city continues to shrink space for cars, taking away some parking spots and car lanes to make room for more bike lanes and trees. A new car-free neighborhood designed for 12,000 residents is now under construction. The city also includes amenities like the worlds largest bike parking garage, part of more than 100,000 bike parking spots throughout the city. Low-income residents can buy refurbished bikes for 30 ($34) through a program that also includes a year of free repairs.
[Photo: Lightfield Studios/Adobe Stock]
2. Copenhagen
Protected bike lanes cover more than half of the streets in the Danish capital, and other roads have been converted to “bicycle streets” that prioritize bikes over cars. The city is continuously improving its bike infrastructure; 29% of all trips happen by bike and nearly half of all commutes to work or school are on bikes. On a typical weekday, Copenhageners collectively ride 2.75 million kilometers (1.7 million miles).
[Photo: Dmitry Rukhlenko/Adobe Stock]
3. Ghent, Belgium
Over the last few decades, Ghent has redesigned streets to prioritize biking, walking, and public transportation. With more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) of protected bike lanesalong with low speed limits for cars and two dozen bicycle streets, the number of car trips keeps dropping. More than a third of trips now happen by bikes, up from 22% a decade ago.
[Photo: Kirill/Adobe Stock]
4. Amsterdam
One of the worlds most famous cycling cities keeps improving. Amsterdam now has around 560 kilometers (350 miles) of protected bike lanes and 11,000 bike parking spaces, including the worlds first underground bike garage. Most city streets now have a 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limit. A school street program blocks off traffic in front of schools when kids are arriving and leaving, making it safer for kids to walk or bike to school. Thirty-seven percent of all trips happen on bikes.
[Photo: UlyssePixel/Adobe Stock]
5. Paris
Over the past decade, Paris has transformed. Some major streets are now car free, and on others, parking spaces and car lanes have been removed to put in bike lanes. A 30-kilometers-per-hour (19-miles-per-hour) speed limit is the norm. There are more than 122,000 public bike parking places. Local businesses have used city subsidies to buy 1,500 cargo bikes. The bikeshare system had 56 million trips in 2024. In the last five years, bike trips jumped from 5% of all trips taken to 11%.
[Photo: Lev Karavanov/Adobe Stock]
6. Helsinki
To help make it easier to bike in Finlands frigid winters, the city clears snow from 150 kilometers (93 miles) of bike lanes. The city now has an extensive network of separated lanes, along with traffic calming, redesigned intersections, and awareness campaigns focused on safety. It also continues to add bike parking, including a new parking garage at the central train station.
[Photo: Schroptschop/iStock/Getty Images Plus]
7. Münster, Germany
In Münster, a compact university town, 40% of city streets have protected bike lanes. The city also has a network of bicycle streets, coated in red to remind drivers that bikes have priority, and a new scenic bike route along a canal. Nearly half of all trips take place on bikes. To nudge people to bike even more, the city uses public billboards to display stats from bike counters that show how many people are riding.
[Photo: Matthias De Boeck/iStock/Getty Images Plus]
8. Antwerp, Belgium
Antwerp has nearly 600 kilometers (372 miles) of protected bike lanes and continues to expand them through its 100 Missing Links program, which includes underpasses and bridges for direct, continuous routes. About 70% of streets are limited to 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour). To help add more bike parking in dense neighborhoods with little extra space, the city has been converting some unused buildings into secure subscription-based bike parking. They now have more than 60 neighborhood sites with 1,600 spaces. Cycling in the city is inclusive, with children and seniors on the road, and women make over half of daily commuting bike trips.
[Photo: pony/Unsplash]
9. Bordeaux, France
Nearly 90% of Bordeauxs streets have speed limits of 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour) or less, and the city has been closing major gaps in its bike network, including new two-way cycle tracks along both riverbanks. Former car lanes on streets like the Quai des Queyries have been converted into continuous, green-framed bikeways. Bicycletteries in the historic center offer video-protected, resident-only parking. The city also uses cargo bikes for waste pickup and deliveries.
10. Nantes, France
Nantess Grandes Voies Vélo network provides high-quality, well-marked bike routes across the city. Almost 90% of streets have low speed limits, complemented by car-free areas, shared streets, and low-traffic neighborhoods. The main train station offers 1,200 secure parking spaces, with more on-street racks throughout the city. Awareness campaigns support a steadily growing bike culture.
[Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images]
11. Bonn, Germany
Bonn is shifting from painted lanes to a growing protected network; about 20% of streets now have protected bike lanes, and over half the city has 30-kilometer-per-hour (18-mile-per-hour) speed limits. The city remains relatively car-dependent, but bike counters show rising use, and cycling mode share has increased from 15% in 2017 to 21% in 2024.
[Photo: oliver de la haye/Adobe Stock]
12. The Hague, Netherlands
The Hague has an expanding network of protected bike routes, with 60% of streets at or below a 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limit and major investments since 2020. The central station holds 8,500 bikes, with 47,000 more spaces on streets. The city continues linking suburban routes and opened the 335-meter (1,099-foot) Jan Linzel bike bridge over the A4. Its “Den Haag Fiets!” program includes kids bike lessons from age 2, free or low-cost bikes for families, and subsidies for shared and cargo bikes.
[Photo: Kseniia Penkova/Unsplash]
13. Strasbourg, France
Strasbourgs Velostras network links the entire metro area, giving the city one of the most recognizable and complete bike systems in Europe. It still needs slower speed limits and redesigned streets, but cycling culture is strongits annual Bike to Work challenge brings new riders, and the city offers over 400 bike parking spaces per 1,000 residents, among the worlds highest. Cargo bikes are widely used for deliveries.
[Photo: Chris Barbalis/Unsplash]
14. Lyon, France
Nearly three-quarters of Lyons streets have 30-kilometers-per-hour (18-miles-per-hour) speed limits or below, and the branded Voies Lyonnaises network makes navigation easy. The city is redesigning major corridors with protected routes, tunnels, and new riverside bikeways, and opened Frances largest secure bike parking hub at its main station in 2025. Its long-running bikeshare now includes low-cost plans for broad access.
[Photo: imageegami/Adobe Stock]
15. Montreal
The highest-ranked non-European city on the list, Montreal has rapidly expanded its protected network with clear, cohesive design and safer intersections. The Saint-Denis corridor hit 1.3 million trips in the first nine months of 2025, helping revive local businesses. Bixi, the city’s bikesharing program, set a record 13 million rides in 2024 and now operates year-round with bike trailers. Montreal pioneered North Americas first bicycle streets and continues to grow ridership.
[Photo: Marek Lumi/Unsplash]
16. Malmö, Sweden
Malmös bike mode share reached 27% in 2024, supported by a dense network with 49 kilometers (30 miles) of protected lanes per 100 kilometers of road. A new regional bike highway is adding underpasses and bridges to close gaps. The city provides extensive parkingincluding 5,000 spaces at train stationsplus air pumps, footrests, and school streets. Cargo bikes are common, and developers are encouraged to include bike pools in new housing.
Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Googles self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test modewith humans in the drivers seats ready to take over, just in casethat its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality.
Since last year, however, Alphabets robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. Its now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that its testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks.
For now, the only passengers will be Waymo employees. But the news is one of the final big milestones before the company offers rides to the public in those five cities, which it says it expects to do next year once all the necessary logistics are in place. In most of the cities, Waymo began driving with an in-car supervisor late last May. (Remote human monitoring and control remain part of the system in all service areas.)
By autonomy standards, taking the human out of the drivers seat in five cities over such a short period is a one-fell-swoop sort of move. According to Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi, the 10 million driverless rides the company has already completed helped it reach this point.
Having dealt with high-speed roads in Phoenix and very narrow corridors in San Francisco, L.A. was faster, he told me. Austin was faster than that. Atlanta was faster than that. So this is just the next step.
The five cities that are part of todays announcement represent only a portion of those where Waymo has announced its intention to add service. Seven moreDenver, Detroit, Las Vegas, London, Nashville, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.are coming soon but not yet ready to do without a human driver aboard. Yet another sevenBoston, Buffalo, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Tokyoare in an earlier stage, where the company is driving and collecting data.
Thats a lot of places that are at least partway down the road to being Waymo cities. Each is different when it comes to their roads and the challenges they present. As Panigrahi notes, even specific intersections can present idiosyncrasies that the companys Waymo Driver platform must map out individually. But he says that localities that might at first blush seem quite different can boil down to similar problems for the Waymo Driver to solve.
You can imagine how when we’re serving the civic center in San Francisco, [after] a Warriors game, he says. It’s not that dissimilar to a whole host of pedestrians coming from the beach and crossing over in Miami Beach.
Panigrahi adds that Waymo highway drivingwhich came to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area last week, after years of anticipationshould also scale up to new markets more quickly.
Highway is a super hard technical problem, and that’s why we took our time to build it and validate it over multiple years, he says. But once you do get that, then the highways do look much more similar across states. There are more nuances in surface streets.
Waymos time as the only company offering a fully commercialized robotaxi service in the U.S. may be winding down. When I tried Teslas robotaxi service last month in San Francisco, a human attendant was in the drivers seat, greatly reducing the amazingness of the experience. But Tesla plans to offer truly autonomous rides to the public by the end of this year, at least in Austin. Earlier this month, the company said that it also plans to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix, portending eventual head-to-head competition with Waymo in all those areas.
Tesla also says it intends to begin mass production of its two-seater Cybercab in April and is rethinking its original plan to remove the drivers seat and steering wheel altogether.
Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Zoox just announced that its begun Zoox Explorers robotaxi service in San Francisco. That means its allowing waitlisted members of the public into its app and giving them free rides in return for feedback. Zoox is already in Explorers mode in Las Vegas.
Should a critical mass of American cities grow thick with driverless Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla robotaxis, it might turn autonomy from a futuristic novelty into mundane workaday transportation. That exposure could boost the technologys reputation, which still isnt great among people who havent been for a ride. For example, a February AAA study reported that only 13% of respondents said they trusted self-driving vehicles.
In Waymos home turf of San Francisco, its cars are omnipresent and public attitude toward self-driving vehicles has been on the rise. Yet the recent death of a bodega cat who was struck by one of its vehicles sparked more of an uproar than the hundreds of animals who are killed by human drivers in the city each year. Waymos own data, based on 96 million passenger-only miles its cars have driven, shows its record is dramatically safer than that of humans. For instance, cars have been in 92% fewer crashes that caused pedestrian injuries.
Panigrahi argues that merely seeing Waymos driving carefully reassures pedestrians and cyclists. After theyve taken a trip in one, its a lot harder to hate them. (In August, The Information wrote that 99% of the 69% of its subscribers whod been in a self-driving car were satisfied with the experience.)
Pedestrians notice that we stop to give them that confidence that they can cross and not play a game of chicken, he says. Even skeptical or on-the-fence folks, once they take their first ride, that magical experience changes their heart.
