
Amazon to expand Prime delivery services in smaller cities, rural areas in US by year end
Amazon earlier this year announced plans to spend more than $4 billion to grow its U.S. rural delivery network by the end of 2026, promising faster shipments to drive up demand from consumers in small towns and the countryside.
The company said it was already seeing customers purchase more frequently and shop for household essentials at higher rates since it started offering faster deliveries in these regions.
With more than 200 million paid Amazon Prime members worldwide, Prime has become a key growth engine for the company. In a bid to boost Prime's performance, Amazon has focused on expanding geographically while also offering discounts to younger shoppers to grow its subscriber base.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


CNA
2 hours ago
- CNA
Amorim prepared to reintegrate exiled Man Utd players if valuations not met
Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim has said he is prepared to reintegrate the club's exiled players into his squad if they cannot be sold for fees that match the valuations expected by the former Premier League champions. Alejandro Garnacho, Jadon Sancho, Antony and Tyrell Malacia have been excluded from the squad that has travelled to the United States for the club's pre-season tour with the quartet seeking transfers away from Old Trafford. But while they have had to work separately from the first team squad since United returned for training ahead of the new season, Amorim acknowledged he would be prepared to accept the players back into his squad should they not be sold. "Some players have to find a new place to have more space in the team and other players clearly show they want a new challenge and want new teams," Amorim told reporters in Chicago ahead of Saturday's pre-season meeting with West Ham United. "We are just allowing these players to have time to think and to decide. If we reach a point where they have to join the team, they will join the team because they are our players. "I'm ready to receive the players. They have more competition, more competition if you want to play in the World Cup next year, you need to play. "So I'm really happy with that because I have more options. If they have to fight each other to play, for me it's perfect." United have signed Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo so far in the transfer window, while England winger Marcus Rashford has left to join Barcelona on loan as Amorim's side looks to bounce back from a lowly 15th place finish in last year's league table. The club's financial situation is such that United need to sell players if they want to add to their squad. Chief Executive Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox are charged with finding buyers for their "bomb squad". "I know for a fact these people - Jason, Omar and the club - have a number for these players," said Amorim. "If they don't reach that, they will be Manchester United players, no doubt about that.


CNA
6 hours ago
- CNA
NASA says 20% of workforce to depart space agency
WASHINGTON :About 20 per cent of the employees at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration are set to depart the space agency, a NASA spokesperson said on Friday. Around 3,870 individuals are expected to depart, but that number may change in the coming days and weeks, the spokesperson said, adding that the remaining number of employees at the agency would be around 14,000.


CNA
7 hours ago
- CNA
Microsoft probing if Chinese hackers learned SharePoint flaws through alert: Report
Microsoft is investigating whether a leak from its early alert system for cybersecurity companies allowed Chinese hackers to exploit flaws in its SharePoint service before they were patched, Bloomberg News reported on Friday (Jul 25). A security patch Microsoft released this month failed to fully fix a critical flaw in the US tech giant's SharePoint server software, opening the door to a sweeping global cyber espionage effort. In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said two allegedly Chinese hacking groups, dubbed "Linen Typhoon" and "Violet Typhoon", were exploiting the weaknesses, along with a third, also based in China. The tech giant is probing if a leak from the Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP) led to the widespread exploitation of vulnerabilities in its SharePoint software globally over the past several days, the report said. Microsoft said in a statement provided to Reuters that the company continually evaluates "the efficacy and security of all of our partner programs and makes the necessary improvements as needed". A researcher with Vietnamese cybersecurity firm Viettel demonstrated the SharePoint vulnerability in May at the Pwn2Own cybersecurity conference in Berlin. The conference, put on by cybersecurity company Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, rewards researchers in the pursuit of ethically disclosing software vulnerabilities. The researcher, Dinh Ho Anh Khoa, was awarded US$100,000 and Microsoft issued an initial patch for the vulnerability in July, but members of the MAPP program were notified of the vulnerabilities on Jun 24, Jul 3 and Jul 7, Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness for the Zero Day Initiative at Trend Micro, told Reuters Friday. Microsoft first observed exploit attempts on Jul 7, the company said in the Tuesday blog post. Childs told Reuters that "the likeliest scenario is that someone in the MAPP program used that information to create the exploits". It's not clear which vendor was responsible, Childs said, "but since many of the exploit attempts come from China, it seems reasonable to speculate it was a company in that region". It would not be the first time that a leak from the MAPP program led to a security breach. More than a decade ago, Microsoft accused a Chinese firm, Hangzhou DPTech Technologies, of breaching its non-disclosure agreement and expelled it from the program. 'We recognise that there is the potential for vulnerability information to be misused,' Microsoft said in a 2012 blog post, around the time that information first leaked from the program. 'In order to limit this as much as possible, we have strong non-disclosure agreements (NDA) with our partners. Microsoft takes breaches of its NDAs very seriously.' Any confirmed leak from MAPP would be a blow to the program, which is meant to give cyber defenders the upper hand against hackers who race to parse Microsoft updates for clues on how to develop malicious software that can be used against still-vulnerable users. Launched in 2008, MAPP was meant to give trusted security vendors a head start against the hackers, for example, by supplying them with detailed technical information and, in some cases, 'proof of concept' software that mimics the operation of genuine malware.