TheChek News Flow

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger Are Down in Worldwide Outage

Hundreds of thousands of users around the world have reported outages, according to Downdetector

Service on Meta Platforms’ META -1.01%decrease; red down pointing triangle Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and Threads was down Tuesday for hundreds of thousands of users around the world.

Over 500,000 users reported outages on Facebook, according to Downdetector, which tracks website outages. About 77,000 Instagram users and 12,000 Messenger users also reported outages.

The outages started to appear shortly after 10 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector. More than an hour later, outage reports started falling.

“We’re aware people are having trouble accessing our services,” Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said on X. “We are working on this now.”

In addition to the U.S., users in the U.K., Canada, Mexico and other countries also reported outages.

Biden administration officials said they hadn’t seen specific or credible threats attempting to disrupt Super Tuesday’s elections, but were monitoring the outages.

“We are aware of the incident and at this time we are not aware of any specific election nexus or any specific malicious cyber activity,” a senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official said during a press call.

Federal officials said they were coordinating with states to address both the potential for physical or cyber threats to Tuesday’s voting, as they have during the past several election cycles.

These outages aren’t uncommon. Glitches, sometimes short and others longer, can disrupt people’s ability to conduct business or interact with friends. Meta has said it has 3.19 billion daily active people on average across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Meta also reported disruptions on its advertising and developer platforms, according to the company’s status page.

Meta had an outage in 2021 that lasted about six hours that disrupted service for millions of users.

X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, poked fun at the outage Tuesday.

“We know why you’re all here rn,” the company said.

X owner Elon Musk also weighed in. “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working,” he wrote on X.

UNCOOKED ALERT: Standard Chartered said to ...

Standard Chartered, the FTSE 100-listed banking group, has come under the spotlight amid a fresh round of takeover talk.

People following the situation have heard rumours Standard Chartered has attracted more takeover interest.

Some people following the situation had heard speculation the interest had come from the Gulf region in the Middle East, possibly Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia.

In January 2023 Bloomberg reported First Abu Dhabi Bank had hired advisors to work on a takeover of Standard Chartered but then walked away from the deal after the news agency unveiled its plans to buy the emerging markets bank.

Last week British fund managers also suggested that Standard Chartered could be a 'takeover target'.

Ian Lance, who runs the Temple Bar Investment Trust, told Trustnet that: "If a big US bank wanted to have a footprint across Asian markets, they could buy Standard Chartered and even its chief executive officer admits that its share price has been crap."

Readers should be aware that some of the takeover speculation surrounding Standard Chartered has been priced into the stock as the company's shares have risen 15pc over the last month.

To be clear, the above story is UNCOOKED. In case you don't remember I have pasted the definition of UNCOOKED below:

UNCOOKED: Market gossip as Betaville receives it. This scuttlebutt has just come in and hasn't been checked with all of Betaville's well-informed RARE sources let alone formal journalistic channels (public relations executives, bankers etc). The rumour might be total codswallop but then again there may be something in it, so it's worth airing on Betaville.

Brad Pitt and Sat Hari’s luxury knitwear label God’s True Cashmere has landed in France with a pop-up at Le Bon Marché, and is expanding its offer.

SOFTLY DOES IT: God’s True Cashmere is all about slow fashion. The Los Angeles-based casual luxury brand, launched in 2019 by Brad Pitt and energy healer Sat Hari, is gradually growing its proposition, and its footprint. “We keep expanding, but step by step,” Hari said at the brand’s Paris presentation.

The brand has garnered a cult following for its 100 percent cashmere shirts with buttons made from healing stones placed to align with the chakras. God’s True Cashmere is available in only a handful of doors worldwide — around 30 — and according to Hari, its $2,000-plus shirts never go on sale.

In late February, the label opened a pop-up at Le Bon Marché, its first retailer in France. The installation is on the store’s second floor, near Sarah Andelman’s buzzy pop-up bookshop exhibit. The brand is hoping to prolong its collaboration with the retailer after the animation closes in April.

Initially created because Hari could not find a super-soft green shirt her friend Pitt had requested as a gift, God’s True Cashmere is also expanding beyond its core offer of shirts. New for fall were the label’s first outerwear pieces as well as a selection of loungewear and T-shirts.

A fluffy fur-like bomber jacket was made from cashmere with a contrast lining and featured a single Carmelite — a new stone for the season — inside alongside a patch featuring a mantra. There was also a waterproof transitional jacket lined with cashmere, its outer made from recycled nylon, and a loungewear ensemble with brass-backed lapis lazuli buttons.

Silas Capital has wrapped up $150 million for a fund for start-ups in beauty, fashion, wellness and other areas.

Consumers and investors alike love a good start-up story and the emerging growth equity and venture capital firm Silas Capital is no exception — having revealed that its newest consumer growth fund, Silas Capital Partners II, has reached a hard cap of $150 million of commitments.

The company said it has been bolstered by prominent institutional investors including endowments, fund-of-funds, insurance companies, global asset managers, family offices and multinational CPG companies. With Fund II, Silas Capital will continue to focus on investments ranging from $3 million to more than $15 million in high-growth, and on what it described as “typically profitable,” consumer brands with revenue of $5 million to more than $50 million. Silas Capital defines its “emerging growth” strategy as between venture capital and private equity.

The new investors and limited partners were not immediately revealed Tuesday.

This new fund invests in a broad assortment of consumer brands including its specialty of personal care and beauty, as well as apparel, fashion, better home goods, health, wellness, food and a range of better CPG brands. As this fund was being raised, four investments were made in Makeup by Mario, Vacation Sunscreen, the sexual wellness company Hello Cake and Wonder Belly, a Silas Capital spokesperson said Tuesday. The prior portfolio invested in such companies as Bellroy, Proenza Schouler, Hatch and Boll & Branch.

In addition, Silas, which was started in 2012 by a team with e-commerce, wholesale and retail experience, aims to invest up to 10 percent of its capital into seed and early-stage brands with smaller passive checks under $500,000 through Silas Ventures, the firm’s early-stage venture platform comprised of two micro funds, Silas Ventures I & II.

In recent years the start-up rate in the U.S. has climbed to its highest level since the Great Recession, due partially to the pandemic and closures generated by an uneven economy.

In 2021 the business start-up rate, which tracks the share of all firms that are formed each year, increased 8.9 percent in 2021 — the highest share since the Great Recession. In total, more than 476,000 new start-ups were formed — nearly a 5 percent increase compared to pre-COVID-19 data, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics. Those figures signaled some optimism that the number of start-ups is expected to continue to grow at higher rates than before the pandemic, in light of the sustained, elevated level of applications that has continued through 2023, according to a report by the Economic Innovation Group. Unlike in the 2010s, when start-up rates dwindled, the 2021 report was considered to be “concrete proof that American entrepreneurship is quite likely on a new path away from the doldrums of the 2010s,” the report said.

Creative director Pelagia Kolotouros and CEO Thierry Guibert are banking on a retail-driven strategy and fresh focus on fashion and tennis to power the brand’s growth.

KEY INSIGHTS

Lacoste is returning to fashion week for the first time since 2021, staging a runway show on the main court of French Open stadium Roland-Garros.

New designer Pelagia Kolotouros plans to advance a contemporary, gender-neutral take on sport and elegance, as well as highlighting its tailoring business.

After crossing €2.5 billion in 2022, Lacoste’s sales grew by double-digits last year despite a slowing fashion market, CEO Thierry Guibert said.

PARIS — “Lacoste is tennis, tennis is Lacoste” has long been a key marketing mantra at the iconic French sportswear label. But as more brands ramp up their efforts in tennis marketing, with the likes of Louis Vuitton and Gucci signing top next-generation players Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, Lacoste is aiming to defend its dominant position on the court.

New creative director Pelagia Kolotouros is set to show her debut collection for the brand Tuesday at Roland-Garros, the tennis complex famous for its clay courts and namesake tournament (also known as the French Open), rivalled in prestige only by Wimbledon.

Roland-Garros is, after all, Lacoste’s home turf: the venue just a few blocks from the brand’s headquarters was built in honour of founder René Lacoste, so that he and his fellow French players could defend the Davis Cup after a historic win in New York in 1927.

Kolotouros has taken that journey and triumphant return as the key inspiration for her collection. The Olympics are coming to Paris this summer, so sport and the ceremony that surrounds it are very much in the air. And as she and chief executive Thierry Guibert aim to diversify and elevate Lacoste’s offer, they’re turning to the blazers and travel coats worn on winners’ podiums — and during play in the early days of racquet sports — to push the brand in a more sartorial direction.

Tuesday’s show will be Lacoste’s first catwalk since 2021 and if the brand’s link with tennis is unshakeable, its approach to runway fashion is fuzzier. Previous iterations of the brand’s fashion week efforts include Felipe Oliveira Baptiste’s ready-to-wear collections, which captured the spirit of Lacoste by celebrating colour and movement but had little to do with what the brand actually sells. His successor Louise Trotter was more product-focused, working to refine and elevate the brand’s wardrobe propositions, but her ideas also trickled into the broader business only in a limited way.

Under New York-born designer Kolotouros, Lacoste hopes to open a new chapter in which ready-to-wear collections will play a bigger role in steering the brand’s offer. There are still show pieces, but the designer has been careful to make sure enough of the collection can be produced at a saleable price. Here, her experience at VF Corp’s The North Face and Adidas and Beyonce’s Ivy Park venture is likely to have helped.

Giving ample space to a creative director’s vision has also become more feasible for Lacoste in recent years, Guibert says, as the company embarked on a programme of sprawling flagship store openings — the fourth of which is set to open in New York next year — as well as following a push to take back control of categories like underwear and shoes from licensees. The brand now operates 1,100 stores where it can show off a broader range of products. Footwear has grown to account for 25 percent of sales.

Meanwhile, wholesale has fallen to less than 35 percent of revenues, compared to a majority of the business when Guibert arrived a decade ago. If polo shirts and athleisure ensembles still drive the business, opportunities to keep hitting other notes abound.

Lacoste, which is privately owned by Swiss holding Maus Frères, also finds itself in a stronger position to take a risk on a new aesthetic. The group hasn’t officially reported figures for 2023, but Guibert says sales grew by “double digits” last year after crossing the threshold of €2.5 billion in 2022.

Lacoste’s challenge in France has long been that it tries to be everything to everyone: selling bourgeois elegance to some, and streetwear extravagance to others. The brand has tried to embrace that perception in recent years with campaigns that poke fun of how colourful characters ranging from provincial grandmas to urban teenagers can all wear the brand as a badge of honour with their crew.

Appealing to those tribes in a single store is already a challenge — not to mention a single collection. At a visit to the brand’s studio last weekend, elevated urban silhouettes, like black logo blazers and rubberised two-tone shoes, were mixed with the sort of tennis-inspired, neo-preppy pieces that have captured many post-streetwear clients in recent seasons. Easy wardrobe items were also present, like a long, body-hugging polo dress and a sartorial camel overcoat: the sort of items which bridge the gap between the commuter client Lacoste has and the more high-end shopper it has always hoped to recapture.

“Sport, elegance, refined but approachable — and gender fluid,” Kolotouros says, when asked what key ideas she hopes will come across in her debut collection.

As for Guibert, he hopes that buyers and press will see “that the brand is moving up — we’ve done so much research to elevate the materials, the fit.”

Your move, Microsoft.

Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary AWS has revealed that it will allow customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem with no so-called “egress fees” attached.

The news follows some two months after Google announced similar plans, though in Google’s case as the third-biggest player in the public cloud triopoly after AWS and Microsoft, it was heavily incentivized to “lead by example” — if it’s cheaper to leave AWS or Azure entirely, then a company might just be more inclined to jump ship to one of the other players.

However, these decisions follow provisions set out in the European Data Act which came into force in January, and which are designed to promote competition by allowing cloud customers to switch providers more easily — either to an entirely different cloud; through adopting a multi-cloud approach; or pulling all their data back in-house to an on-premises infrastructure.

While AWS already allows customers to transfer up to 100GB of data per month off its servers for free, this won’t cover companies looking to “lift and shift” their entire data stores to another provider — and that is what is effectively changing for AWS customers as of today.

It’s also worth noting that while the European Data Act is entirely concerned with promoting competition in Europe, AWS’s move applies to its operations globally (similar to Google’s announcement earlier this year).

Companies that want to move their data off of AWS are requested to contact AWS, which will then apparently issue credits for the data being migrated. Though AWS principal developer advocate Sébastien Stormacq says that he “sincerely hopes you do not.”

Microsoft will likely follow suit now that Google and AWS have announced these plans. TechCrunch has reached out for comment, and will update when (or if) we hear back.

But what they should be thinking about are the consequences

It feels like a long time since we last had a proper bond market liquidity freakout. For anyone hankering for their fix, the International Capital Market Association is out with a new report.

Last year ICMA set up a Bond Market Liquidity Taskforce — which is probably as glamorous as it sounds. The BMLT has now published its first report, examining the health of the “core” European government bond markets, in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.

Anyone who has followed this debate over the past decade will be unsurprised by ICMA’s “key findings”. Bond market liquidity has become more procyclical as banks retrenched — and is particularly and scarily flighty at times of extreme stress — so regulators should “review” their post-crisis rule books.

• Liquidity in the core European bond markets is generally good, as defined by the ability to execute larger than average transactions, relatively quickly, without significantly moving the market.

• However, in recent years liquidity has become much more sensitive to both episodes of unexpected volatility and regulatory reporting dates (ie year-end and some quarter-ends).

• This can be roundly attributed to the combination of a significant increase in the outstanding stock of government debt while primary dealer balance sheets and appetite for risk, on aggregate, have reduced markedly.

• Applying modelling on historical bid-ask spreads, it becomes clear that at certain points these widen significantly, and this cannot be explained by volatility alone. Rather, volatility is the catalyst for a discernible retreat from liquidity provision.

• Furthermore, the speed at which markets become volatile (the ‘volatility of volatility’) has increased, possibly aided by greater transparency and more dependence on e-trading and automation.

• Repo markets function well, even in times of heightened stress, but are also subject to sharp drops in liquidity around reporting dates.

• Liquidity in the sovereign bond futures markets is generally good, although limited to a few contracts, and again prone to a rapid thinning and widening of prices in times of stress.

• Market participants accept that episodic heightened volatility, with rapid evaporation of liquidity, and a sharp repricing of risk, is the new normal.

• Participants also believe that central banks will be required to intervene in bond markets more frequently and systematically to restore stability.

• The consistent recommendation from market participants, both sell side and buy side, to make sovereign bond markets more resilient, is that policy makers and regulators should review the design and calibration of prudential regulation as it applies to primary dealers. They suggest that there is a trade-off between high levels of bank capitalization and liquidity and bond market resilience.

Basically what everyone in the finance industry has been saying for over a decade, In other words. As well as, to be fair, many central banks, think-tanks, financial regulators and even the IMF. They just think the price of more fickle bond market liquidity is worth paying if it results in a much stronger banking sector.

However, Alphaville still wants to dwell a little on ICMA’s penultimate point, because it touches on an important subject that probably doesn’t get discussed nearly enough (and when it does get discussed it tends to get very emotional, very quickly).

One of the consequences of a financial system where banks are losing ground to shadow banks/non-bank financial institutions/capital markets (delete according to preference) is that the traditional lender-of-last-resort function of central banks will inevitably have to evolve and be widened.

Historically, the focal point of most financial crises has always been banks. Given how disastrous their mass failure can be, central banks therefore almost always (if reluctantly) backstop the industry. But now that markets do more of the heavy lifting, central banks will increasingly have to wade in there to keep the financial system from imploding and damaging the real economy in the process. What was once considered unorthodox monetary policy is now strikingly orthodox.

This was abundantly apparent in March 2020 and 2022’s LDImageddon, even if has never been formally articulated. But as Dan Davies noted on FTAV a couple of years ago, even the BIS — the cathedral of central banking orthodoxy — has floated a new “backstop principle”, which stipulates that:

. . . In situations where it appears likely that market dysfunction will have a material adverse impact on the real economy, central banks should consider using their ability to expand their balance sheets and provide liquidity in order to mitigate this impact.

Quite a lot of central bankers AND market participants are extremely hostile to the idea that being a lender of last resort in the modern era might mean becoming a dealer of last resort.

But as the ICMA report very gently hints, “central bank interventions to stabilise markets [will become] increasingly inevitable and less extraordinary.”