United States of America eSeries: Home prices hit another record 🏡

Home prices hit another record 🏡

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The internet's kinda fragile. Let's get into it.

By Allison Morrow

🔌 INTERNET BREAKAGE

If you, like most Americans working from home, spent the morning gawking at AirBnbs and pricing out flights, congratulations, you broke the internet.

Just kidding. Kind of.

Here's the deal: Around midday on the East Coast, some intern over at an internet infrastructure service company tripped on a wire (or so I imagine — I should confess I don't actually know how the internet works). That created a big ol' disruption across a wide range of corporate websites, including AirBnb, FedEx, Delta, Fidelity, HSBC and McDonald's. You can imagine how upset the eight people trying to visit McDonalds' website must have been.

The whole thing appeared to last less than an hour but hoo-boy did our CNN Business Slack channel get fired up.

By Thursday afternoon, Akamai explained that the outage was caused by a "software configuration update triggered a bug in the DNS system" — that's a thing I'm told helps route web browsers to their correct destinations and also provides a security service. The company said it was not the result of a cyberattack.

These outages aren't new or unusual, but I suspect there are two main reasons this one sparked a fury of chatter.

It's the third major internet outage in two months, and the second involving Akamai. In early June, dozens of websites including Target, the New York Times went down for less than an hour because of a failure at content delivery network Fastly. Ten days later, airlines, banks, stock exchanges and trading platforms suffered brief outages, which Akamai said was the result of a bug in a service that helps mitigate distributed denial-of-service attacks.
It's a Thursday in late July. What are you even doing if you're not ignoring your inbox and booking travel? It's hot vax summer, or whatever. Work can wait.

🏡 NUMBER OF THE DAY

$363,300

Home prices hit yet another record high, even as inventory increased slightly. The median price for an existing home last month hit $363,300, up 23% from last year. That marks 112 straight months of year-over-year gains.

🔗 SUPPLY CHAIN CHAOS

General Motors is halting production on most of its full-size pickups for a week because of a lack of computer chips, my colleague Chris Isidore reports. Toyota and Honda have also stalled production at plants in Thailand and Japan for the same reason. If that sounds like news from spring 2020, that's because automakers are dealing with the same problem more than a year after the spread of Covid-19 upended global trade.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

The Delta variant is unlikely, many economists say, to lead to the kind economic fallout we saw last year, thanks to vaccines.

The threat Delta poses — apart from the obvious public health nightmare — is to the global supply chain, which has already been gummed up by the one-two-punch of pandemic-related shutdowns followed by resurgent, ravenous demand for cars, housing material, appliances, and any number of other goods. That's why if you ordered a new stove in April you're likely not seeing it till August, and I yes, I am speaking from personal experience.

GM is confident the shutdown will be temporary, it said. The bad news for anyone in need of a new truck is that you're going to be paying top dollar, and waiting even longer for delivery.

RELATED: Back-to-school shopping is going to be even more of a nightmare this year.

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

🐊 Crocs, maker of the world's most hideous and yet mysteriously beloved clog, filed trademark infringement lawsuits against Walmart, Hobby Lobby and other companies it accuses of copying its design. ("Design" seems like a strong word but whatever.)

🔑 Kaseya, the software firm whose remote access tool was used to deliver REvil ransomware to hundreds of businesses around the world this month in a devastating supply-chain attack, has obtained a decryptor key allowing it to unlock networks seized by the malware.

✈️ Airlines are still reporting losses, but a surge of vacation travel is brightening their financial outlooks.

🥕 The amount of food wasted globally every year — 2.5 billion metric tons — is nearly double previous estimates, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund and UK grocery retailer Tesco.

⚖️ California sued Activision Blizzard, one of America's largest video game developers, alleging multiple female employees were subjected to gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay.