TR.BIZ: 11.20.2025
From Cloudflare outages to a Danish cookie panic, this is your late-mid-week check-in š«
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Editionā¢, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of whatās happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Reportā¢. Today, weāre talking our lackluster holidays, things your boyfriend puts up his ass, and the cancellation of an āedgyā Brooklyn actor.
šØ REMINDERS šØ
Two upcoming (Free!!) events happening to share, for any aspiring writers or those hoping to hone their craft.
š Happening November 22 at 10AM PST / 1PM EST / 7PM CEST, Rax Ishida Will will be talking queer narratives and translating identity into writing: RSVP here!
š Happening December 3 at 9AM PST / 12PM EST / 6PM CEST, Sarah Labrie will be doing a deep dive into memoir, essay, and beyond: RSVP here!
š² Tech Talk: The future is tech outages
On Tuesday, web infrastructure site Cloudflare went down, taking with it Twitter, ChatGPT, Zoom, Grindr, and more. While a very online thing, which most people may have registered it as a random inconvenience, but I definitely clocked it as yet another mass outage ā and I want to put a bug in your ear that weāre entering an era of such occurrences as being akin to digital weather. Let me paint you a picture: last month, Amazon Web Services went down globally, potentially affecting billions of dollars worth of business; last July saw global business stop down as Crowdstrike experienced disruptions, taking everything from multi-national banks to universities to governments down; for the past two years, news of outages in airports ā Newark, Dallas, Baltimore, LAX ā along with airlines ā Alaska, American, United ā have risen and fallen, as two major stories ā Heathrowās ācatastrophicā power failure in July 2025, the aforementioned Crowdstrike outage in July 2024 ā defined this trend; and the massive continental collapse of Spain, Portugal, and part of Franceās power infrastructure in April 2025. These are all warnings that, like Covid in 2020, something these increasing sputters are warnings of aging infrastructure and or that these systems are as over-stressed and over-taxed as we are ā and failures are happening. As has been gleaned with each outage, weāre not prepared for a world where we are regularly forced offline (despite our lusting for such offline lives). You would think, despite all the AI buzz, that we would have such little problems like this settledĀ ā but we donāt, which suggests to me that the AI of it all is maybe further exacerbating these problems. Another thing? Those beautiful, dazzling, yet more frequent solar storms are a heavy warning that these will get worse as such interference from the sun fucks with power grids, especially flights and space travel. This isnāt something to stress about, but itās yet another thing to carry forward as tech becomes more and more wobbly on an infrastructural level, all issues aside from enshittification and AI slop. Is this the end of an era and the start of many an error? Perhaps.
š„ Soft Powers: A forced fun holiday
