Everything Went to Hell Today and It’s All Amazon’s Fault
TodayInDigital is a daily podcast showcasing the latest in marketing trends and updates. Today, Tod touches on:
There’s a reason your favourite web tool was down today — and you can blame Amazon for it.
Pinterest is going into the educational events business.
And Twitter might take away your blue checkmark.
Below is the transcription from this episode
It’s Wed, November 25th 2020.
Happy national jukebox day.
I’m Tod Maffin from engageQ digital. And here is what you missed, Today in Digital Marketing.
It IS a slow news week in the world of digital marketing — Americans celebrate Thanksgiving this week, and I think that just slows the cycle down a bit.
But there are a handful of things to chat about.
AWS went down
First, you may have had trouble today accessing your favourite web tools like Adobe Spark or MixMax. And that’s because Amazon Web Services had a huge outage.
AWS is NOT the Amazon store that you’re thinking of. Rather, it’s the separate division of the company that sells large-scale app and database hosting. A BIG chunk of the Internet uses it. So when AWS goes down, so too do all the tools that rely on it. And it’s not just digital marketing tools — even some people’s robot vacuums went on strike.
This seemed to start early this morning and it’s still happening as I record this at about 1:30 pacific time.
Amazon says this is only happening in North America. They didn’t say what caused the outage. One schaudrenfredian irony is that the outage also affected its own status page — you know, the page that reports outages.
Among the web services affected: Anchor, Ring, Prime Music, Meetup, Roku, Flickr, — and the payment processor Paddle, which then creates its own sort of sub-outage for those web services that rely on it to process subscriptions. Even the popular game League of Legends is all messed up because of it.
So anyway, nothing we can do about it, of course, just wait it out and re-think your emergency offline contingency plans.
Pinterest Events
It looks like Pinterest will soon be dipping its toes into online events. Someone reverse-engineered the site’s code and found a way for people to sign up to Zoom classes through Pinterest, and a change to their board’s system to introduce Class Boards with materials and notes and stuff.
Interestingly, looks like these new board types will include live chat as well.
QUOTING Techcrunch: “It’s not surprising that Pinterest would expand into the online events space, given its platform has become a popular tool for organizing remote learning resources during the coronavirus pandemic. Teachers have turned to Pinterest to keep track of lesson plans, get inspiration, share educational activities, and more. In the early days of the pandemic, Pinterest reported record usage when the company saw more searches and saves globally in a single March weekend than ever before in its history, as a result of its usefulness as an online organizational tool.”
Pinterest did confirm the feature was in development but didn’t share anything else.
Twitter De-Verifying
Yesterday I reported that Twitter would resume the blue-checkmark verifications. They stopped adding them a couple of years ago when people called them out for verifying shady people.
Now, we’ve learned that Twitter giveth AND taketh away. They say they plan to de-verify some accounts. But… if you HAVE a blue checkmark — either for yourself or your brand — as long as you’re active and have completed your profile, you should be okay, since that’s what Twitter says it’ll look for when considering which accounts to take the checkmark away from.
Or, as WeR-SM.com pointed out: “Make sure your profile is complete, and that you do not look like an egg. Although if you do look like an egg and you have been verified, you might need to start seeing yourself in the egg business, who knows?”
Safari Problem
A small tidbit that COULD have some ramifications for you. The podcast company Libsyn says it’s discovered that, a couple of weeks ago, Apple updated their Safari browser for their OS version 14 — that’s known as Mojave. And apparently, as part of that release, they broke it. Specifically, they’ve broken the ability for Safari to properly open up a file browser to select a file to upload to web applications, attach files in Gmail, and so on. Again, this seems to be limited to people still on macOS Mojave. So until there’s a fix, you may want to use Chrome or Firefox to do your media uploads.
Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com.