A buzzy social media app goes down

and back up. and then back down again. 🎢

Good Monday Morning! It’s Feb 8th — the Tampa Bay Bucs notched the franchise’s second Super Bowl win last night. It was the seventh NFL championship for quarterback Tom Brady. Many are saying that he is a goat 🐐¹.

Anyway. Here’s the SWIRL!

📱Tech: A buzzy social media app goes down
📈Business: With Bezos aside, a cloudy future
🏛Politics: Government hacks

Before we get started…if this is your first SWIRL, keep reading this part. If you’ve been here before, carry on to the content. Welcome, new swirlers! Here’s a brief reader guide for you: the three teasers above will unfurl below to briefly cover a buzzy development in their respective areas. You’ll read a little about each one. At the end of the SWIRL, we’ll pull on a common thread among them all and explore what it might mean for us. If you missed last week’s SWIRL, tuck in here.

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📱Tech: A buzzy social media app goes down
For most of last week, elder Gen Z’ers² were posting all over the internet about a relatively new social media app called HIVE 🐝.

The app, which has been around since 2019, feels like a ‘best hits’ album from the major social media apps preceding it. It’s a lot like Instagram in that user-posted photos comprise most of the shared content. The news feed serves up chronological posts like old school Facebook and Instagram. There is also big Twitter energy throughout the app in the form of short, text-only posts. And for those of a certain age, the music feature will trigger MySpace nostalgia as users can select songs that auto-stream when visitors land on their profiles.

Yes, I downloaded the app. No, my profile song is not Beez In The Trap. Sorry Nicki.

Why were Gen Z’ers buzzing about HIVE? Early last week, in an ironic twist, users on other social media platforms (TikTok & Twitter) promoted the app prompting 130,000 downloads overnight, according to the company’s CEO, 22-year old Kassandra Pop. For HIVE’s application servers, the sudden influx of new users was a total buzz-kill. Literally. The app went down. Multiple times. Pop addressed users’ complaints and provided updates on the outages via Twitter:

The upgrading of their ‘entire plan’ seems to have centered on a shift to Google Cloud. It’s unclear what set-up the HIVE team was using before new users swarmed the app last week, but the up-start’s new partnership with Google could ensure that server outages no longer sting the company. HIVE’s latest posts on Twitter suggest they’re now focusing on moving forward with updates and new features for their growing colony of users.

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📈Business: With Bezos aside, a cloudy future
It would have been hard to miss the announcement of Jeff Bezos’ departure from his 27-year-long perch atop Amazon. But in case you missed it last week, now you know. Bezos will become “Executive Chairman” of the Amazon Board, where he’ll focus on “new products and early initiatives,” according to an email he sent employees on Tuesday. Most Americans - and by most, I mean 82% of households - have an Amazon Prime 📦 account. That’s basically all the people.

Interestingly, the majority of the Seattle-based company’s profits don’t come from its Amazon Prime business. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a Cloud ☁️ computing arm of the parent company drove 52% of Amazon’s total profits in the latest quarter…a no-brainer explainer for the elevation of the current AWS chief, Andy Jassy, to replace Bezos. Apparently, the AWS money-making machine isn’t the only reason Jassy makes a good replacement as CEO.

Mr. Jassy followed Mr. Bezos everywhere, including board meetings, and sat in on his phone calls, said Ann Hiatt, who was Mr. Bezos’ executive assistant from 2002 to 2005. The idea, she said, was for Mr. Jassy to be “a brain double” for Mr. Bezos so that he could challenge his boss’s thinking and anticipate his questions.

A brain 🧠 double?! That sounds…neat.

No-brainers and brain doubles aside, business pundits and market-watchers view Jassy’s promotion as a clear indicator that AWS and ‘Cloud’ will be at the center of Amazon’s post-Bezos strategy. Last year, the Cloud market was worth about $370B, according to some estimates. By 2025, it’s expected to thunder towards $832B. And that, folks, is why Amazon’s future will likely be very, very Cloudy - with a big C.

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🏛Politics: Government hacks
”Hello citizen, I’m from the government….” is typically something none of us ever want to hear. Let’s say we did. Most likely, such a knock on our door would be accompanied with some type of badge or credential. And we’d probably have an idea of what the government was after. <remembers to file taxes>

On Feb 2nd, Reuters reported the US government was paid a “visit” by Chinese government hackers — they definitely did not introduce themselves and we’re still learning the extent of what they were after. We do know that the hacker group gained access to government payroll data by exploiting a vulnerability in a software system called Orion, which was developed by the US cyber firm SolarWinds. You may remember SolarWinds as the same company the US government recently accused Russia of exploiting to gather sensitive information from the US Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Homeland Security, and the National Institutes of Health.

President Biden spoke on Thursday about his administration’s “urgent initiative” focused on shoring up US cyber capabilities in light of increased espionage 🕵🏼‍♂️ from both China and Russia. In addition to appointing top experts, the US is aiming to set aside $10B to fund the new cyber security priorities outlined by Biden. A strong government response won’t be the silver bullet. Private companies doing business with the government, like SolarWinds, have a big responsibility to ensure their products and related services are secure.

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The SWIRL

So, how do these three stories swirl together? They illuminate the bright and dark spots of Cloud technology. Admittedly, there’s more of “tech-lean” to this week’s SWIRL. In fairness to me, it’s hard to not see a tech angle to most news these days. In any case, here are our takeaways:

• HIVE met increased user demand, keeping their business alive, by making an eleventh-hour pivot to hosting their app on Google Cloud, which is a competitor of…

• Amazon - the company’s Cloud boss now has the CEO’s chair and will likely storm-chase increased profits for Amazon and its shareholders as the Cloud market expands. But as with most clouds, there is some rain…

• The US government hacks were partly executed through cracks in SolarWind’s Cloud security, which underlines the risks some Cloud technologies can pose to national security and private companies.

Organizations of all shapes and sizes will continue to consume more Cloud-based solutions. For Cloud newbies, here’s an oversimplified explanation of “the Cloud”: another company owns and operates the IT guts supporting a product or service. This allows the Cloud solution buyer, like HIVE, to focus on their product instead of upgrading servers, for instance (if you know, you know).

There is very little debate that the Cloud forecast is - everyone together now - bright & sunny 🌞. The uncertainties roll in when we start assessing risks posed by increased adoption of Cloud technology and predicting exactly which Cloud companies will capitalize on the impending Cloud boom. AWS has a head start there, but keep your radars trained on Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

And Russia and China.

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1. They’re actually saying he’s the “GOAT” - and the acronym stands for “Greatest of All Time” if you were unaware. And with seven Super Bowl wins, okay. I just think it’s funnier to slightly misinterpret pop culture references on purpose.

2. Elder Gen Z’ers? Gen Z includes those individuals currently aged between 6-24 years old. I’m classifying ages 13-24 as “Elder Gen Z’ers” because this is my newsletter. And because Twitter’s terms of service require users to be 13+.