Anker recalls over a million power banks due to fire hazard — find out if yours is affected
Anker makes some of the best portable charging accessories you can buy, but the company is now issuing a swift recall of one of its most popular power banks due to potential fire hazards.
In fact, the company is recalling over a million units of the AnkerPower Core 10000 with the model number A1263 — pictured above. The company says the affected units were manufactured between January 1, 2016, and October 30, 2019, and sold between June 2016 and December 31, 2022.
The power banks were sold through the likes of Amazon, Newegg and eBay and if you own one, you should stop using it right away. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, these batteries are at risk of overheating and causing a fire.
The commission says Anker has already received 19 reports of fires and explosions and two reports of minor burn injuries.
Anker has already received 19 reports of fires and explosions and two reports of minor burn injuries.
We often recommend Anker products here at Tom's Guide but this is the third product recall the firm has issued in recent memory. Last year, Anker issued two separate recalls for power banks and speakers due to fire risk. However, this one dwarfs those two.
According to the commission, a staggering 1,158,000 units are being recalled — making this one of the biggest accessory recalls in the U.S. due to a fire risk.
Anker is providing replacement power banks (a different model, the A1388 10,000mAh power bank) or a $30 gift card for affected units. You can find out if yours qualifies by locating the serial number at the bottom and letting the company know through its recall form here.
Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.
You'll need to provide proof of the purchase as well as a photo of the power bank with the serial number visible. Anker requests you submit a "photo of the recalled portable charger with the submission date and the word "recall" or "recalled" written on it in permanent marker."
Finally, if you do have an affected Anker 1623 power bank, please make sure you don't simply throw it in the trash. Your municipal household hazardous waste (HHW) collection center may accept this recalled lithium-ion battery or device for disposal.
As the commission explains: "Before taking your battery or device to a HHW collection center, contact it ahead of time and ask whether it accepts recalled lithium-ion batteries. If it does not, contact your municipality for further guidance.
"Consumers will also be required to confirm disposal of the power bank in accordance with applicable laws and regulations before receiving a replacement."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Meet the Briton who helped teach Alexa how to talk
British AI entrepreneur William Tunstall-Pedoe has always been 'motivated by impact'. He started pushing the boundaries on what's possible with machines as a 13-year-old schoolboy, while Tunstall-Pedoe secretly helped create and launch Amazon's (AMZN) Alexa over a decade ago. In between, his anagram technology was used by author Dan Brown for the Da Vinci Code and he even identified the most boring date in history. The first keyboard seeds were sown at Dundee High School in Scotland where he was able to venture to the technical college next door before classes and during breaks to write computer software on its mainframe. There were financial rewards, too. His computer science teacher, Michael Ryan, had a software business which sold by mail order. However there was no taking advantage of the pupils, says Tunstall-Pedoe, with very generous royalties and a decent income on offer. Read More: Meet Britain's 'king of billboards' who sold his business for £1bn 'I kind of very arrogantly set out to try and solve this problem of using language to control machines,' he tells Yahoo Finance UK, 'to automatically answer questions, change the user experience you have when you interact with search engines, when you interact with computer software, and kind of invented some technology to tackle that.' It is 20 years since he started his search and voice recognition company True Knowledge, later called Evi Technologies. Tunstall-Pedoe charts the company as a "10-year adventure", seven as a venture-backed independent start-up before being sold to Amazon in 2012 for a reported £21m and its CEO staying on for over three years. 'When we launched, we were trying to solve the problem of basically using computers by speaking to them or with language,' he recalls. 'When you look at science fiction I watched as a child, Star Trek or Blake's 7, all the computers you just have a chat to. It understands you and is the most natural interface. This is how we interact with people. 'But when you used a computer back then, you select from a menu, click a button or you guess keywords and browse links that come back from the keyword search. So we were tackling the problem of how to use language to interact with machines, which of course is incredibly topical now because large language models (LLMs) have essentially cracked that. But we were doing this way back.' In the mid 2000s, Tunstall-Pedoe would demo his software on conversational search and recalls being told by Google (GOOG) that not only was this a worse customer experience but that keyword search was infinitely better. 'That's definitely not the case now,' says Tunstall-Pedoe, who lives in London and Cambridge, the latter a 'crazy converted church' where Spitting Image was also created. Read More: 'Why we set up a sustainable mobile operator to save people money' Evi pivoted several times as a start-up, from a search engine that answered questions to producing a voice assistant, launching at the same time as Apple's Siri. The 30-strong Cambridge outfit had multiple acquisition offers before working on a secret project for Amazon, now known as Alexa, which went to market in late 2014. He later spent a period as an angel investor backing over 100 tech start-ups before his latest venture, Unlikely AI, came into focus. The British venture, which raised nearly £15m following a seed round in 2023, is currently developing technology that combines LLMs with symbolic methods to make AI safer for companies in sectors such as healthcare to provide verifiable insights. 'How do you enable systems built with modern AI to be fully explainable, auditable, not get you into trouble with regulators, and not lead you to making business decisions that cost you lots of money?' says Tunstall-Pedoe. 'We're tackling some of the biggest problems in AI, which is how to make it completely trustworthy and how to ensure the answer is always accurate.' With the advent of ChatGPT, the inventor has admitted that most companies aren't succeeding when it comes to implementing LLMs, which learns to predict the next word, into workflows. He says: 'If you're making a business decision based on the result of an LLM and your private data, and it gives you a wrong answer, that can be really expensive financially and to your brand. If you're in a regulated industry it can get you fined. You can even get the CEO in jail in extreme cases if you break regulation really badly and this is a fundamental problem.' Read More: We sold a hand cream every 36 seconds after appearing on This Morning Thus Unlikely AI, he adds, was born to not only earn trust but to solve complex issues with its deep learning software. 'That means making it accurate, so when it gives you a result, you can trust it,' says Tunstall-Pedoe. 'Sometimes it may tell you it doesn't know rather than guess and it also means explainability and auditability, to fully explain in a very clear way how the result was created. 'Ultimately, it's also about the customer or business being in control and that's the kind of experience that we're shooting for. We're still relatively early, but we're looking to be very successful and become a very big company.' How I identified the most boring day I built this huge database of millions of facts about the world, where the system could make sense and reason with them. I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of all the facts that the system knew, and in particular with the goal of finding what the least interesting date in history was — 11 April 1954. The story went so viral that it got told and retold and it's had new life ever since. There was a play in Germany that was kind of themed on it and all sorts of crazy things that have happened as a result of that. Entrepreneurship One of the things I love is that you can have a very significant impact as an individual if you've got an idea and you pursue it. If you build a software product that does something valuable and different, it can scale like no other product can. You can have 100 million users within a couple of months if you create a really successful piece of software, which is kind of almost impossible in almost any other industry. That's what's exciting about it, that potential for big impact if you're developing technology in the software world that really hits home. Read more: The boss who has found 'nature's answer to plastic' Meet the company that finds 'must-haves' to make everyday life easier Impossibrew CEO says Dragons' Den failure sparked alcohol-free brand's riseSign in to access your portfolio
Business Insider
4 hours ago
- Business Insider
Visa Stock Plunges: Here's Why This Analyst Is Bullish
Visa (NYSE:V) was amongst several payment processor stocks taking a hit in Friday's trading as crypto's ongoing march toward mainstream adoption has sparked concerns about the implications for the group. Confident Investing Starts Here: Specifically, the Wall Street Journal reported that major retailers are seriously looking into using stablecoins as a way to sidestep the high fees tied to traditional card payments. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have apparently explored creating their own U.S.-based stablecoins, a shift that could potentially save them billions in processing costs by moving away from the conventional banking and card network infrastructure. If either Walmart or Amazon were to launch such a payment system, it could pose a major threat to traditional financial institutions, especially regional and community banks. These retailers not only have enormous customer and employee bases, but also access to massive amounts of consumer data and far fewer regulatory hurdles than banks. That combination has long made them powerful, and potentially disruptive, players in the financial space. Stablecoins are digital tokens typically pegged one-to-one with a government-issued currency like the dollar. They're backed by reserves such as cash or U.S. Treasurys and are currently used mainly for storing value or trading other cryptocurrencies. Whether these retail-led stablecoin projects move forward will likely depend on the outcome of the Genius Act, a bill that would lay the groundwork for stablecoin regulation in the U.S. The legislation recently passed a key procedural step but still needs to clear both the Senate and the House. So, credit card use might get switched to crypto, marking a continuation of sorts as Visa's growth has long been powered by people switching from cash to cards, historically accounting for about two-thirds of its volume growth. For Mizuho's Dan Dolev, an analyst who covers both crypto and payment platforms, a big issue he recently mulled revolved around how much 'US cash conversion runway' remains. Dolev's deep dive into different spending categories suggests that Visa's slower-than-expected growth compared to overall U.S. consumer spending since the pandemic isn't necessarily a sign of weakness. Instead, it's mainly because Americans have been spending more in areas that don't typically rely on cards, like rent or healthcare, and less in card-heavy areas like travel or dining. The good news is this trend is beginning to reverse. More importantly, Dolev believes there's still a lot of untapped potential for card adoption in the U.S. While consensus estimates put card penetration at 80 to 90%, the analyst thinks the real figure is closer to 75%. 'This leaves room for another decade of solid top-line growth domestically. Plus, V's performance in Canada & Nordics offers evidence of above-PCE growth, even when card penetration is >90%,' Dolev said. But whether stablecoin adoption changes all that remains to be seen. All told, for now, Dolev rates V shares as Outperform (i.e., Buy), while his $425 price target makes room for 12-month returns of 20%. (To watch Dolev's track record, click here) The rest of the analyst community remains firmly in V's corner too; the stock claims a Strong Buy consensus rating, based on a mix of 24 Buys and 4 Holds. The average price target stands at $388.85, implying shares will climb 10.5% higher in the months ahead. (See Visa stock forecast) To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks' Best Stocks to Buy, a tool that unites all of TipRanks' equity insights.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
Walmart and Amazon looking at creating their own cryptocoins as digital currencies popularity rises
Walmart and Amazon are looking to create stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency, people familiar with the company's plans have said. Higher-ups at the company are hopeful the high volumes of cash and card transactions will save them billions in fees, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The coins could limit the fees and immediately transfer money to retailers. Stablecoins are used to store cash or purchase other cryptocurrency tokens. The coins are backed by Treasuries and have a one-to-one exchange ratio with dollars or government currencies. Still, for the payment method to be implemented, lawmakers would need to pass the Genius Act, a piece of legislation that aims to establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins. The legislation would need to be approved by both the House and Senate. One trade group has been lobbying members of Congress to push for the legislation's passage. The regulatory framework for stablecoin, the Merchants Payments Coalition, said in talks it would allow merchants to utilize alternative payment methods that could significantly lower expenses. The news sent Visa and Mastercard stocks down about six percent on Friday. Visa was the worst performer on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 close to noon. Still, it's not clear if competition between the coin makers and banks would be beneficial. Walmart is lobbying to include an amendment that would introduce more competition in the credit-card sector. Airlines and other companies like Expedia Group are also working to implement the payment system, sources told the outlet. It's not clear how the country's biggest banks would respond to the move from the two largest retail vendors. Cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular, with approximately six percent of the population owning one type of digital coin. A person familiar with the ongoing Amazon discussions said the company's plans are in the early stages, but there are talks of potentially using outside stablecoins. In a note this week, TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg said the 'push to instant payments is inevitable and represents a risk' to Visa and Mastercard, according to the newspaper.
