Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:
The internet is down
For a few hours on Tuesday morning, huge swathes of the internet went down.
Data from DownDetector.com, a tool that tracks outages and reports of problems at major websites, details how problems reported at huge internet properties such as Amazon, Spotify, PayPal and many others suddenly exploded in volume.
Not so Fastly
You probably recognize most of the companies in the chart above, with the exception of the last one. Fastly is the reason everything went wrong. Fastly is a cloud computing company, which maintains servers that let websites load content quickly — and it turns out a lot of websites use them.
One of the industries hit hardest were news sites, including CNN, The New York Times, The Financial Times and many others. Some resorted to live tweeting their news reports, but our favourite impromptu solution has to go to tech website The Verge which fired up a public Google Doc to start publishing their news stories. That kind of worked, but they forgot to turn public editing off so — for a brief period — anyone could edit the document, which obviously was chaos.
Fastly has come out and said "our bad", and so far it appears that the error was not the cause of a cyberattack. Intentional or not, the outage was a timely reminder of how fragile — and interdependent — the tech ecosystem can be.
The latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) makes for grim reading. The NOAA reveals that the amount of Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere averaged 419 parts per million in May — the highest reading on record.
Not only is that the highest reading on record, it's also way above any previous peaks from the last 800,000 years, which scientists are able to estimate by using air bubbles that have been trapped in mile-thick ice cores. Some estimates suggest that 419ppm hasn't been seen in Earth's atmosphere for an even longer time period — potentially millions of years.
The fact that the pandemic reduced human emissions by 6-7% was good news, but it still meant that we collectively pumped millions of kilograms of CO2 into our atmosphere.
P.S. National Geographic has a good 2 minute refresher video on global warming, and how CO2 contributes to it.
Big Tobacco is still... big tobacco. This week British American Tobacco reported its latest financial results, painting a rosy picture for investors with a forecast to grow its revenue by 5% this year.
Wait... tobacco is still growing?
The cigarette industry may feel a bit like its been close to being extinguished ever since the health concerns about smoking became common knowledge in the 1960s — but somehow the industry has survived, and even thrived.
BAT, for example, reported sales of £25.8bn last year ($36bn). For context, that's more than Tesla ($31bn), adidas ($24bn) and Netflix ($25bn). The tobacco industry as a whole is expected to grow to more than $260bn a year by 2027, according to some estimates.
Although big tobacco giants remain predominantly reliant on good old fashioned cigarette sticks, they all have various bets on potential new technologies that are healthier or less toxic than traditional ciggies. BAT itself now boasts more than 13 million consumers for its "non-combustible" products, which includes vaping. The company is hoping to hit 50 million by the end of the decade. Big tobacco is not dead, far from it in fact.
1) US authorities have recovered the majority of the ransom paid to hackers of the Colonial Pipeline, seizing approximately $2.3m in Bitcoin.
2) More than 25% of shoppers at Levi's are wearing a different size this year according to Levi's CEO, with many shoppers gaining — or losing — weight during the pandemic.
3) The G7 countries agreed last Saturday to support a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%, in an effort to deter multinationals from storing profits in low-tax-rate economies.
4) Comfortable sweatpants that are actually stylish enough to be worn anywhere? Sign us up. Check out Public Rec's All Day Every Day Pants.**
5) Macaroni pasta, when perfectly packed is still 67% air. Scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University want to fix that, and have reportedly developed a way of packing pasta in a compact 2D form that can then change shape as it cooks.
6) Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has invested $500m into Nubank, a digital bank based in Brazil, valuing the fast-growing start-up at $30bn.
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