On the rise: U.S. consumer confidence rose this month as Americans shrugged off concerns about rising prices and COVID’-19’s highly contagious omicron variant. The Conference Board, a business research group, said today that its consumer confidence index—which takes into account consumers’ assessment of current conditions and their outlook for the future—rose to 115.8 in December, the highest reading since July. Read the full story.
Offline: Amazon’s massive cloud computing operation suffered a brief outage Wednesday, marking at least the third time this month that a large number of websites and services used to perform everyday tasks seized up in tandem, The Washington Post reports. Amazon Web Services said on its status page that the disruption stemmed from a power outage at a data center in northern Virginia, and that network connectivity had returned to normal. Read the full story.
Adjusted: The U.S. economy grew at a 2.3% rate in the third quarter, slightly better than previously thought, the Commerce Department said today. But prospects for a solid rebound going forward are being clouded by the rapid spread of the latest variant of the coronavirus. The third and final look at the performance of the gross domestic product, the nation’s total output of goods and services, was higher than last month’s estimate of 2.1% growth. See the report.
