It’s Cyber Monday, so if you haven’t given ecommerce a shot, today would be a great day to try buying something online. Of course, every day is cyber day. That was true before the pandemic and its even more true now. That’s why companies like Etsy, Shopify, and Stripe have been among 2020’s biggest stock price winners. That’s why Black Friday was basically Cyber Monday, and still, Cyber Monday could be the biggest online shopping day ever. And that’s why Amazon went from really big to bigger, really. In a year that set records for job losses, Amazon is currently hiring around 1,400 new employees a day (and that’s down from the summer peak of 2,800 hires a day in July). “Amazon added 427,300 employees between January and October, pushing its work force to more than 1.2 million people globally, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. Its number of workers now approaches the entire population of Dallas.” NYT: Pushed by Pandemic, Amazon Goes on a Hiring Spree Without Equal.

+ I’ve often referred to the big tech companies like Amazon as the new nation states. Apparently, Jeff Bezos agrees, because his company is acting like one. Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups. All they need now are thermonuclear weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before you can buy those on Amazon.

+ And you may have noticed that a lot of your favorite sites and services were down last Wednesday. That was because Amazon (the company also provides the backend for a significant portion of the internet) suffered a cloud-computer outage. What caused the error? They were trying to add more capacity to the system.