Apple chief executive Tim Cook joined Twitter on Friday, as huge crowds formed around the world to buy up the California giant's two new iPhones.

In his first tweet, Cook described his visit to customers waiting for iPhones near the company's headquarters.

BlackBerry Friday said it would cut 4,500 jobs as the struggling Canadian smartphone maker retrenches in the face of hefty losses and weak sales of its new handsets.

BlackBerry said it expects a loss of $950 to $995 million in second quarter mostly due to writedowns linked to poor sales of its Z10 smartphone, the device aimed at reviving its fortunes in a market dominated by Android and Apple.

Apple fans clamoring for the two new iPhones formed a kilometer-long queue in Tokyo Friday, but high prices in Asia and the lack of a new tie-up in the vast China market dampened the global roll out.

The once-unbeatable smartphone has secured a lucrative new deal with Japan's biggest mobile carrier that lent some celebrity glitz to the opening day in Tokyo, and guaranteed a lively welcome from a nation of gadget-lovers.

The Wall Street Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, said Thursday it would split with the technology news website AllThingsD by the end of the year.

The news comes amid a major reorganization in Murdoch's holdings, following a split of his News Corp into two separate groups.

Russia on Thursday threatened to block Facebook for allegedly publishing ads for illegal designer drugs on its website.

The state media watchdog said it had added Facebook to a blacklist and that the social network would be blocked within three days if the violations were not resolved.

Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Thursday his biggest regret is missing the boat on smartphones -- but he said the software giant should not admit defeat just yet.

"I regret that there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren't able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone," Ballmer said in a conference with analysts.

Hiroshi Yamauchi, credited with transforming Nintendo from a family-owned Japanese business into a global byword for video games, died Thursday from pneumonia. He was 85.

Yamauchi was just 22 when he took over the family business from his ailing grandfather and he went on to head the firm for over half a century.

The music and movie industries are sounding the alarm again on online piracy, saying illegal downloads are on the rise and search engines like Google aren't doing enough to stop them.

Entertainment executives say they have no intention of trying to revive failed U.S. legislation that would have imposed unprecedented regulations on Internet companies. That proposal last year prompted a fierce backlash from tech companies and activists who said it would damage the Internet as a free and open enterprise.

Gamers gathered Thursday for the start of the Tokyo Game Show, an annual extravaganza that this year will give punters their first real taste of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.

Developers from more than 350 companies in 33 countries were vying to showcase their latest offerings, with special areas in the vast Makuhari Messe convention center set aside for romance simulation games, cloud gaming and the booming smartphone and tablet game sector.

Several hundred employees of the online retail giant Amazon went on strike in Germany on Thursday in a planned three-day walkout over pay, unions said.

Between 300 and 400 employees on the morning shift halted work at two logistics centers in Bad Hersfeld in the west of Germany, said Mechthild Middeke, a representative of the giant service-sector union Verdi at Amazon.