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Have you been paying attention?! The smartest - and fastest - Fluxxer playing our Flux daily quiz this week will win an IKEA voucher. 

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Here's everything you need to know today - in under 3 minutes.‍

Today's big stories:

✈️ Qantas wants to extend its partnership with Emirates

🚨  Facebook, WhatsApp and Insta went down

🏎 Tesla's secret sauce sees it beat expectations

Oh and get this...

How's ya credit score looking, team? Excellent? Average? Not sure? Welcome to Flux's Credit Score Restore. For the month of October, we'll be dropping exclusive content to the Flux App, to help you get your head around credit...and smash your financial goals.

Let the good times roll 'cos Qantas wants to keep playing with Emirates

Background: Qantas is Australia's largest airline (which actually stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service)...and Emirates is the world's largest airline.  

What happened: In 2012, Qantas and Emirates announced a strategic alliance, which saw Qantas re-route passengers going to Europe through Dubai, rather than Singapore. Beyond that, the crew coordinated their pricing, sales and schedules.  

What else: The pair had already extended their partnership through to 2023, but are now seeking to extend it a further 5 years to 2028. 

So what's the key learning?

💡In the business world, companies can come together in a couple of different ways. The two most common being a joint venture, or a strategic alliance.

💡A joint venture is when two or more companies join together to form a whole new business, to carry out a particular task. Like how Mazda and Toyota created the Mazda Toyota Manufacturing company in the US, with the goal being to increase production.

💡A strategic alliance is an agreement between two or more companies to pool their resources together and work towards a common goal. And, it's delivered a huge upside ($80 million per year) for Qantas and Emirates.

Zuckerberg gives our thumbs a scrolling vacay

Background: Depending on how obsessed with social media you are (for us, a lot), you may or may not have noticed that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram (aka Zuckerberg's trifecta) all went down yesterday morning. 

What happened: In the wee hours of Tuesday morning up until around 8.45am, the three social platforms went dark. And the Internet flocked to Twitter to make memes about it.

What else: While it was mostly funny for us mere mortals, but the Zuck lost around US$6 billion of his personal wealth. And businesses who use the platforms for advertising also suffered. 

So what's the key learning?

💡The impact of a social media can be funny, but it ain't all jokes and laughs, Flux fam. 

💡Instagram and Facebook are economies unto themselves, where people can see advertisements and make purchases on the platform. So when they go down...it can cost businesses a lot. In fact, reports show the outage cost the global economy around US$160 million.

💡It can also cost FB a lotta cash too. The social media giant was losing around US$545,000 in ad revenue per hour during the outage...and the company's share price dropped around 3%. Yikes.

Tesla's got the secret sauce to extra car sales

Background: Tesla are like the Apple of electric cars, and they're selling like hotcakes. But, there's one big problem: there ain't enough supply.  

What happened: Analysts expected Tesla to deliver around 230,000 cars over the last 3 months...but they also kinda expected Tesla to fall short of this figure cos of global chip shortages (the key ingredient in EVs).

What else: But trust Elon Musk, King of the Doge and the world's richest man, to have something slippery up his sleeve. He revealed Tesla actually sold more than 240,000 cars worldwide...cos his engineers wrote new firmware allowing them to substitute in alternative chips. 

So what's the key learning?

💡More and more, old school car makers are finding it hard to compete in today’s software-centered world - because of where they have come from (think: big, bureaucratic and slower to respond to customers).

💡But Tesla tries to operate more like a software company than a car company. Case in point: chip-shortage-gate. They wrote new firmware to overcome the issue. 

💡Although some of Tesla’s innovations (*ahem* cybertruck) can seem fanciful or out of touch - sometimes - just sometimes - they drop a bomb like this one.