Total market capitalization is roughly $500 billion. So buying back $2.3 billion of shares only shrinks the number of shares by less than 0.5%. That improves EPS by all of about 3 cents. Not enough to matter.
The two are unrelated. They could spend all their cash on buybacks and the earnings would be the same.
Earnings are reported per share so stock buybacks are actually a pretty common way to make earnings look better. Of course, it doesn't change the total earnings but the number reported by techcrunch would indeed change.
The analysts making EPS estimates know about the buybacks too and increase the EPS to compensate.