⚡ Major AWS outage took down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more.

🦍 Listen to Jane Goodall narrate a final ad for Apple.

👀 Potentially creepy new Facebook feature suggests photos from your camera roll to share.

📉 TikTok’s ongoing U.S. uncertainty has marketers rethinking next year’s budgets.

📊 The aftermath of the DEI reversal… by the numbers.

📌 Infographic: LinkedIn shares B2B Marketing Measurement Playbook.

💄 E.l.f. Cosmetics is the first to test Twitch’s new livestream shopping ads.

YouTube’s 2025 “Culture & Trends” report analyzed the top 5,000 most-purchased products from the first half of 2025 and the top 1,000 videos by transaction on tagged products over a 60-day period. It also surveyed thousands of online users aged 14–49 to understand their attitudes towards internet shopping.

Notably, 61% of 14- to 24-year-olds agree that YouTube has helped them discover brands/products they didn’t know about.

Some key findings…

• Creators: Influencers leverage their expertise to become trusted sources who offer solutions to address their viewers’ needs.
• Communities: Groups of channels with shared interests create collective content that significantly influences purchasing decisions.
• Content: Innovative formats help shoppers search for, learn about, and ultimately buy products.
• Product trends: Real-world trending products have the potential to transform into even more popular online phenomena.

FYI, Twilio has rolled out a new suite of data tools.

Alerting Hub centralizes notifications, instead of using multiple systems. Granular Observability helps you get to the bottom of campaign issues.

Expanded Audience and Destination Configuration APIs streamline audience management, while Profile APIs give direct access to Twilio Segment’s unified Data Graph, simplifying tasks like querying customer entities, updating identifiers, and ensuring PII compliance.

Plus, Auto-Instrumentation lets non-technical marketers tag website or app events without developer support (hallelujah for real).

Mint Mobile wasted no time finding a real person named Tilly Norwood (as opposed to the controversial AI-generated actress making headlines right now) and getting her signed up as a customer. Props.

The campaign, called “MINTernet,” highlights the brand’s new 5G service at $30/month. Ryan Reynolds, (w)ry as ever, interrogates Norwood about her humanity, drawing contrast between all the AI hype and Mint’s real value.

Consensus is clear: Carbon-based organisms only.