Hi! Louvre without a trace: Shortly after the world’s most-visited museum opened its doors on Sunday, thieves stole eight items of “priceless” jewelry from the Louvre in Paris, in a heist lasting only 7 minutes. Today we’re exploring:

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Amazon Web Services outage takes down major websites including Reddit, Snapchat, and Venmo

When Amazon’s cloud service sneezed this morning, huge chunks of the internet caught a bad cold, including the ESP we send this email through, which is why it’s hitting your inbox later than usual.

First noted by Amazon Web Services at 12:11 a.m. PDT on Monday, the cloud service provider detected an “operational issue” in northern Virginia, a hub for its global data centers, affecting “multiple services” in its US-EAST-1 region.

What followed was a morning of app-based chaos around the world, as users reported that popular websites and services including Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox, United Airlines, and Venmo were suffering from the outage, according to Downdetector data. Most AWS services are back to business as usual, as the “underlying DNS issue” (sometimes referred to as the internet’s phonebook, DNS directs recognizable website names to unique IP addresses) has now been “fully mitigated.”

The long list of major websites that were affected by Monday’s outage reflects just how reliant our modern internet infrastructure is on a few giant tech companies.

Data from Built With shows that a whopping 76 million websites are based on AWS infrastructure, including more than 20,000 websites that earn more than $1 million every month.

Dark cloud

Originally developed from the e-commerce giant’s desire to build its own technology stack, AWS now rents out its infrastructure to customers that want to make their products and services accessible all over the world without having to drop millions to buy the capital-intensive hardware themselves. AWS is now a major profit driver for Amazon, contributing 53% of its operating income as of the latest quarter, thanks to its dominant market position ahead of competitors Microsoft and Google.

Interestingly, investors largely shrugged off the outages; the stock briefly dipped a little over 1%, but it closed trading on Monday up over 1.5%.

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Luxury giant Kering is getting out of the beauty game, offloading its perfume and cosmetics empire to L’Oréal in a €4 billion cash deal, only two years after launching Kering Beauté to get into the space.

The sale includes Creed, the high-end perfume house Kering bought in 2023 for €3.5 billion, along with long-term fragrance and beauty licenses for Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Balenciaga. L’Oréal, already the world’s biggest beauty company, will take over those brands under 50-year licenses, while fully integrating Creed into its own portfolio.

Gucci slides

For Kering, a €4 billion ($4.7 billion) cash injection and a stream of future royalties might be just what the embattled luxury giant needs. Kering’s net debt ballooned to €10.5 billion by the end of 2024 after a spree of acquisitions that included Creed and Valentino, as well as prime real-estate buys in Paris, Milan, and New York. That coincided with a major slump in demand for its crown jewel: Gucci, which made up nearly half (45%) of group revenue last year.

The brand's struggle mirrors a broader luxury slowdown, with the post-pandemic revenge spending fading — particularly in China. However, Gucci’s weakness doesn’t seem to have been limited to one region, with Kering’s sales dropping in North America, Europe, and Asia more broadly. This may be in part due to a shift towards "quiet luxury," as flashier brands like Gucci and Balenciaga have fallen out of favor with more minimalist consumers.

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Cybercrime: A threat…and a portfolio opportunity?

In an increasingly connected world, cybercrime is a real and growing
threat. According to the FBI, reported losses from internet crime
exceeded $16 billion in 2024, a 33% increase from 2023.

Industry research body Celent forecasts that global IT budgets will
reach $290 billion in 2025 as private companies and national
governments seek to protect themselves from cyberthreats.

As a result, investing in the cybersecurity companies developing these
necessary technologies presents a compelling opportunity for investors.

Nasdaq Cybersecurity Indexes and the ETF products that track them
offer investors broad exposure to these companies.

We’re way past peak TED Talk — maybe a new “Vision Steward” can revitalize the nonprofit

TED — the company that became known as the online go-to for illuminating, if somewhat formulaic, talks on everything from body language to spam emails — has called off its eight-month search for a new boss, announcing that it’s found the “beautiful answer” to who will lead the company into the future.

That solution? New “Vision Steward” Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, a pioneering not-for-profit edtech company that offers resources for millions of kindergarten- to college-aged students across the world. Khan, who’s hosted his own TED Talks on various educational methods, will take the reins from Chris Anderson, who turned the company into a charity after buying it for $14 million when it was languishing in the wake of the dot-com crash in 2001.

The new “Vision Steward” is walking into a company whose best-known offerings, the wisdom-imparting talks from the likes of Bill Gates and Adam Driver made at the company’s popular conferences, now seem a little dated.

As The Economist pointed out last week, the company’s financials had flourished under Anderson: revenues rose above the $100 million mark in 2023, while some potential suitors valued the company at $1 billion since February, per the boss. However, YouTube search interest in the clips from its conferences, where standard tickets can cost as much as $12,500, has waned.

Indeed, of the 40 most viewed videos on TED’s official channel, only one was uploaded within the last five years. Searches on YouTube for “ted talk,” meanwhile, peaked in May 2017, thanks to popular uploads such as Elon Musk talking about the future and The Boring Company, which he’d launched earlier that year.

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Industry research body Celent forecasts that global IT budgets will reach $290 billion in 2025. Nasdaq cybersecurity indexes and the ETF products that track them offer investors broad exposure to the companies developing these critical technologies — learn more.

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Off the charts: Which once-popular, now-obsolete web portal is still drawing more traffic than Etsy, Target, and Apple every month? [Answer below]. 

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