Twitter will keep its nest in San Francisco.
Twitter’s chief financial officer, Ali Rowghani, announced in a post on the microblogging site Friday that the company had signed a lease on a new headquarters in the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood.
The deal comes after the city’s Board of Supervisors gave final approval to a tax break that will exempt the company from paying city payroll taxes on new hires. The rapidly growing social media service is expected to add more than 2,000 new employees over the next few years.
City leaders pitched the tax break as a way to bring economic revitalization to the struggling neighborhood near City Hall.
The company said it expects to move into the new space in mid-2012.
Sony probing PlayStation outage
Sony Corp. is investigating the outage of its PlayStation Network, a system that links gamers in live play worldwide.
The company first blogged about the outage Wednesday and on Thursday said it could take a “full day or two” to get the service back up and running. It did not indicate what it believed to be the cause of the outage.
Posts on a PlayStation message board on Friday afternoon indicated the system was still down.
Sony representatives did not return messages left seeking comment.
The outage comes just after Tuesday’s release of the game “Mortal Kombat,” which is available on the PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360. It also comes as Amazon.com tries to restore computers used by other major websites as an outage stretched beyond 24 hours.
China OKs Nokia deal for Motorola unit
Chinese regulators have approved the acquisition of Motorola Solutions Inc.’s network business by Nokia Siemens Networks and the $975 million deal should close next week, Nokia Corp. said.
The sale was part of Motorola’s restructuring but was delayed after Beijing launched an anti-monopoly investigation.
Chinese regulators gave “unconditional approval,” clearing the last regulatory obstacle, and the deal will close April 29, Nokia announced Thursday.
The Chinese approval also follows the settlement of a lawsuit in U.S. federal court against Motorola by a Chinese network equipment maker, Huawei Technologies. Huawei said the deal could mean its business secrets would end up with Nokia Siemens, a competitor, because Motorola resold Huawei equipment starting in 2000.
