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Daily business news and economic stories

Twitter reports outage … via Twitter

Here are the numbers we're reading and watching for Tuesday.

300 million

That’s how many active users are on Twitter … but perhaps we should say in-active. On Tuesday, Twitter went offline for many users, displaying an error page for many who visited the site. Ironically, Twitter reported the outage via a tweet. As BBC Technology writes, the outage would be particularly problematic for companies looking for data insights during the outage, as Twitter’s application program interface was also experiencing issues.

17 percent

That’s how much visits to so-called “fast-casual” restaurants went up in the three years following 2008’s recession. Rather than looking for cheap, fast eats that may not be the healthiest, diners are increasingly flocking to eateries that offer more gourmet options at quicker speeds.

30,000

That’s how many jobs Standard Chartered PLC says it will cut, joining the ranks of two other major European banks — Credit Suisse Group AG — to announce massive layoffs in the last two weeks. As Bloomberg writes, the various cuts come in response to stricter rules that cut into profitability.

5 to 7 million

That’s how many layoffs Arthur Kroeber, managing director of GaveKal Dragonomics in Beijing, predicts for the Chinese heavy industrial sector in 2016. With numbers on China’s GDP for 2015 on the uptick, there’s good news and bad news for the year ahead — a slow down in the economy, but a higher savings rate.