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• A major AWS outage appeared to impact many online services, including Amzon, Snapchat, Venmo, Reddit, and Perplexity.
• AWS said it had mitigated the underlying issue and its services were showing “significant signs of recovery.”
• But “significant” connectivity issues remain “across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS later added.

Americans continued to run into issues accessing many online services early Monday afternoon as Amazon worked to mitigate a major Amazon Web Service outage.

The AWS outage brought down major online services in the early hours of the morning, including Amazon, Snapchat, Signal, and Perplexity.

A status page for Amazon’s cloud unit showed more than 80 of its own services were affected at the outage’s peak Monday morning.

While the company said the underlying issue had been “fully mitigated” and that most AWS service operations were “succeeding normally now” at 6:35 am ET, a fresh wave of outage reports spiked in the US later Monday morning on outage-tracking website DownDetector.

At 10:14 a.m. ET, AWS reported “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The severity status on the AWS status page is currently “degraded.”

Reports on Downdetector trended up for Amazon, Venmo, and Pinterest.

Many other online services that use AWS’ cloud services and infrastructure, including Zoom, Strava, and Amazon’s Alexa assistant, appeared to experience outages early Monday morning, according to Downdetector.

Among other services that showed issues on Downdetector earlier on Monday were financial service providers Venmo and Robinhood; airlines including United and Delta; and telecoms giants AT&T and Verizon. User reports also indicated problems with workplace tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Asana.

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI startup Perplexity, said in an X post at 3:22 a.m. ET that its service is down. “The root cause is an AWS issue,” he said. “We’re working on resolving it.”

A United spokesperson told Business Insider that the AWS outage disrupted access to its app and website overnight, and that the airline implemented backup systems to “end the technology disruption.”

Robinhood said in a post on X that its services are “back online and recovering,” while a Snapchat spokesperson told Business Insider the company is aware that some users are experiencing issues with the app and advised them to “hang tight” while it investigates.

T-Mobile was listed as showing issues on Downdetector but a company spokesperson told Business Insider that it didn’t experience an outage on its own service, and that its customers “had issues when trying to use other sites or services due to a third party’s outage early this morning.”

An Amazon spokesperson directed Business Insider to its service status page.

What we know so far

On Monday morning, AWS’s status page showed that DynamoDB, its database service underpinning many online applications, was experiencing “significant error rates” for requests to its data centers located on the US East Coast.

The issue stemmed from a problem with DNS, the company said, which translates website names to IP addresses and is often described as a phone book for the internet.

The company’s status page first reported that it was investigating the issue at 3:11 a.m. ET on Monday.

At 12:13 p.m. ET, Amazon reported progress had been made.

“We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services,” the company said.

At 11:43 a.m. ET, AWS said that it had “narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services,” and that the “root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.”

As of 1:38 p.m. ET, the company said that mitigation efforts were “progressing” with some internal systems “now showing early signs of recovering in a few Availability Zones (AZs) in the US-EAST-1 Region.”

“We are applying mitigations to the remaining AZs at which point we expect launch errors and network connectivity issues to subside,” the company added.

Another online outage

It’s not the first time an outage at one service provider has brought down large chunks of the internet.

In July last year, a faulty software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused computers around the world to crash, sparking chaos for airlines, hospitals, banks, and businesses.

There have also been notable online service outages in 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 — typically stemming from faulty updates or misconfigurations at one underlying service provider.

“Today’s outage is another reminder that the digital world doesn’t stop at borders — a local fault can ripple worldwide in minutes,” said Charlotte Wilson, head of enterprise at Check Point Software, a cybersecurity company. “We’ve built convenience on shared systems, but resilience still depends on people and process.”

• OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy is not impressed with the state of AI agents.
• Karpathy appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast last week to discuss his observations on AI development.
• Functional AI agents “will take about a decade,” he said.

Even in the fast-moving world of AI, patience is still a virtue, according to Andrej Karpathy.

The OpenAI cofounder, and de facto leader of the vibe-coding boom, appeared on the Dwarkesh Podcast last week to talk about how far we are from developing functional AI agents.

TL;DR — he’s not that impressed.

“They just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff,” he said. “They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working.”

“It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues,” he added.

Agents are among the most talked-about innovations in AI, with many investors dubbing 2025 “the year of the agent.” While definitions vary, agents are virtual assistants capable of completing tasks autonomously — breaking down problems, outlining plans, and taking action without user prompts.

Karpathy is a famously fast talker. So he wrote a follow-up post on X for listeners who couldn’t quite parse everything he said. On the topic of agents, he reiterated his earlier frustrations.

“My critique of the industry is more in overshooting the tooling w.r.t. present capability,” he wrote. “The industry lives in a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless.”

He doesn’t want to live there.

In Karpathy’s ideal future, humans and AI collaborate to code and execute tasks.

“I want it to pull the API docs and show me that it used things correctly. I want it to make fewer assumptions and ask/collaborate with me when not sure about something. I want to learn along the way and become better as a programmer, not just get served mountains of code that I’m told works,” he wrote.

The con of building the kind of agents that render humans useless, he said, is that humans are then useless, and AI “slop,” the low-quality content generated by AI, becomes ubiquitous.

Karpathy isn’t the only one to raise concerns about the functionality of AI agents.

In a post on LinkedIn last year, ScaleAI growth lead Quintin Au talked about how the errors agents make are compounded with every additional task they take on.

“Currently, every time an AI performs an action, there’s roughly a 20% chance of error (this is how LLMs work, we can’t expect 100% accuracy),” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “If an agent needs to complete 5 actions to finish a task, there’s only a 32% chance it gets every step right.”

While skeptical of the current state of AI agents, Karpathy said he isn’t an AI skeptic.

“My AI timelines are about 5-10X pessimistic w.r.t. what you’ll find in your neighborhood SF AI house party or on your twitter timeline, but still quite optimistic w.r.t. a rising tide of AI deniers and skeptics,” he said.

• Our family always bonded over getting the house ready for Halloween.
• We couldn’t wait until decorating season began in October.
• This year, my kids didn’t want to join in. So I did it myself.

Halloween is a big deal in our house. Or, as I discovered this year, it used to be.

I was never stumped about what to buy for my son’s birthday in late September. At the top of his list would be somewhat useless things, such as fake live wires that hiss and shake, or pricey licensed products, including a replica proton pack from the Ghostbusters franchise.

He loved to visit the local Spirit Halloween store and pick out his gifts for under a certain amount of cash. It was great to see his face light up when he reached the animatronics section, stamped on the touch pads, and recoiled as a giant spider or demented nun jumped out.

But not this year.

My son didn’t want to go into the Halloween store

This fall, a week before his 15th birthday, I literally had to drag him out of the car when we parked up. He wanted to stay inside to play on his iPhone, a tactic he pulls whenever we try to take him for a short hike.

His dad confiscated his devices, and he reluctantly entered the store. It was a treasure trove of killer clowns, decapitated pigs’ heads, and Harry Potter merchandise. My son showed about as much interest as a rap fan at a country music festival.

He rallied for a while, looking in the mirror at himself in a Jason Voorhees mask from Friday the 13th. Then he decided on Michael Myers and rushed to the checkout as if he couldn’t wait to get out.

I once made a 160-mile round trip to pick up an animatronic purchased on eBay

In 2024, he spent 90 minutes choosing between the scary, sleeping scarecrow and a one-armed zombie called Rick Ratman, who had rodents coming out of his head. He opted for the latter, which he proudly positioned on the stoop.

He joined a haunted, moving tree that I’d bought on eBay — it involved a 160-mile round trip to the seller’s home in a neighboring state— and a giant, talking triffid from Home Depot.

It’s a tradition to install a new animatronic ahead of every October 31. Kids from the neighborhood ride past on their bikes to admire it. Some have been known to photograph or video it, and that’s why I bought a 6ft screeching night owl statue on special offer last month.

I told everyone that October 5th was Halloween decorating day. It was one of the highlights of the year, second only to putting up our Christmas stuff.

My teenage daughter said, ‘Less is more, Mom’

As time passes, my 17-year-old daughter has become less hands-on than her younger brother. But she still got a kick out of draping black lace fabric around our lampshades for that sinister Victorian seance look.

This year, she didn’t even want to do that. She said that our decorations were tasteless and tacky. “Less is more, Mom,” she scoffed before bolting to Starbucks with her friends.

It wasn’t too long ago that she’d sit at the kitchen table making “mummy lanterns” from Mason jars, gauze bandages, fairy lights, and googly eyes. She’d excitedly bake headless gingerbread men and splatter them with blood-red icing.

Excuse the horror pun, but it was my son who stuck the proverbial knife in my heart. I dragged in the boxes of decorations from the garage. He sat on the sofa playing Nintendo without looking up from the switch.

I asked if he wanted to help twist the bendy spiders’ legs around the staircase. “You do it, Mom,” he said. This was a stark contrast to when he was younger, and it was a ritual we enjoyed together.

“Shall we assemble the owl?” I asked. He shook his head. Eventually, I forced him into the front yard to hold the ladder while I hung up two corpses in cocoons.

It wasn’t the same as previous years

It wasn’t much fun putting up the decorations by myself. I missed the banter, the laughter, and camaraderie of family. Our au pair and his friend came to the rescue by building the new animatronic and zip-tying the skeleton to the swing on our tree.

But it wasn’t quite the same. I know that many children become more distant toward their parents as they grow up. But as I stuck another AA battery into a groaning plastic chandelier, I felt sad that I was losing my kids — or had already lost them —over time.

Do you have an interesting story about parenting to share with Business Insider? Please email Jane Ridley at jridley@insider.com

• Jack Buser, global director for games at Google Cloud, said AI is changing the industry.
• Buser said AI is streamlining business operations and speeding up projects.
• “AI can be used to create entirely new gameplay experiences,” he said.

Gamers have been waiting over a decade for the release of Grand Theft Auto 6. It is probably the most highly anticipated game of all time.

AI could speed things up.

Google Cloud’s Global Director for Games, Jack Buser, said AI has arrived at an important time for the gaming industry, and could help developers release new and better games more quickly.

“We’re just very, very fortunate that AI has arrived on the scene at a time when the games industry really needs it more than ever before,” he said recently on the “Strictly Business” podcast.

While layoffs and a post-pandemic decline hit the gaming community hard, Boston Consulting Group said industry revenues are expected to reach $266 billion by 2028, driven in part by the adoption of artificial intelligence. Major gaming companies like Ubisoft and King are already using AI in their operations.

Buser said one of the key impacts AI could have on the industry is ramping up the time it takes to go from an idea to a release date, something fans of the GTA franchise can almost certainly get behind.

“It is not unusual to find video games that take years and years and years and years to develop. Some take a decade to develop. It’s wild how long it can take to develop a video game,” Buser said. “And oftentimes, that’s because in development, the time it takes for you to get an idea to reality in a game — it’s what they call iteration time — can be quite lengthy. But with AI, you’re able to actually get your ideas into the game much more quickly. You’re able to accelerate that iteration loop.”

Buser said AI’s potential impact on gameplay is what excites him the most.

“This is where AI can be used to create entirely new gameplay experiences, right? So, we’ve actually seen AI land first in development and analytics, but where it’s ultimately going to go is this idea of providing experiences for players that simply would have been impossible before. Probably the most famous example of this is what we call a smart NPC,” Buser said.

Buser said NPCs, or non-player characters, typically rely on preset responses and actions when interacting with users in a game.

“Oftentimes, the way games are designed today and in the past, you would go up to one of these characters and they would say something to you. Then you get to choose like two or three, four different things to say back,” Buser said.

With AI, Buser said NPCs could evolve.

“However, with AI, you can actually make these conversations in natural language,” he said. “You can talk to a player in the game, they stay within character, and you’re actually having an ongoing dialogue with them as if it’s another human being, but it’s not.”

• I’m a Quebec local, and I only recently visited our Bas-Saint-Laurent region for the first time.
• The drive to the area from Montreal was scenic, and we enjoyed exploring the shoreline.
• This region is absolutely worth visiting, though you may want to pack a rain jacket and boots.

As a city dweller living in Montreal, I know there’s still so much of Quebec that I have yet to explore.

My French-Canadian home province is roughly three times the size of France and has 17 regions. This summer, I checked a new one off my list: Bas-Saint-Laurent.

My partner’s brother and his wife were born in the maritime region and travel there every summer with their young daughter. This year, they invited us to tag along and discover its beauty for ourselves.

Even our drive to the region felt incredibly scenic.

To reach this region, my partner and I drove 400 miles outside the city along the south shore of the lower Saint Lawrence River, nicknamed “Bas-du-Fleuve.”

It’s in this area that the river widens into a gulf that flows into the Atlantic Ocean. The water is vast — a mix of fresh and saltwater — and breathtakingly beautiful.

The drive from Montreal to Bas-du-Fleuve takes roughly six hours if you go straight and take the largest highway.

It’s a little longer if you opt for the slower, more scenic route and make stops along the way like we did. Trust me, it’s worth it.

The drive gets especially pretty after Quebec City, where the views of the water begin.

The area is known for its fresh fish, local meats and cheeses (hello, cheese curds), and craft beer. So, we made stops at Tête d’Allumette, a microbrewery with a beautiful terrace overlooking the river, a smoked fish store called Marché Des Trois Fumoirs, and a specialty cheese store called Fromagerie des Basques to stock up on local goodies.

We eventually arrived at Motel de la Mer, which looks out at the river, where we all stayed in an apartment-style accommodation.

We found plenty to do in the area.

Our first morning in Bas-Saint-Laurent was rainy, so we toured the Onondaga, a 295-foot submarine that traversed the North Atlantic from 1967 to 2000. It’s also the first publicly accessible submarine in Canada.

We also stopped next door to visit the Empress of Ireland Museum, an exhibition about the greatest maritime tragedy in Canadian history.

Then, we met up with the rest of the gang for brunch in downtown Rimouski, the biggest city in the area. We filled up on eggs, crepes, bacon, and good coffee before walking around the city center and popping into cute local shops.

It was especially wonderful to walk along the shore.

Later that afternoon, at low tide, we walked along the nearby shore, taking in the views as we looked for interesting rocks and shells.

When the tide is low in this region, parts of the shoreline become exposed, and you can actually see and explore the sea floor.

When the tide rises again, that same shoreline is resubmerged. There are different high and low tides each day, and their timing and height vary.

We also enjoyed having fresh seafood.

That evening, we picked up dinner from a casse-croûte, a locally used term for a small, casual establishment that serves comfort food.

I had a lobster roll and fries while my partner had a lobster poutine.

We were highly impressed with the quantity and freshness of the seafood.

The nearby provincial park is beautiful — but beware of the fickle weather.

The following day, we headed out to Parc national du Bic, a beautiful provincial park nearby. We had a picnic and then started walking along the shoreline before turning onto one of the many hiking trails in the woods.

The weather started off gray and cloudy, but eventually turned to heavy rainstorms that left us quite wet. We laughed it off and still had a good time.

This region regularly experiences rainfall (in part due to the St. Lawrence’s oceanic influence), so be sure to pack a great rain jacket and boots if you plan to visit.

We also experienced the area’s famous sunsets.

The spectacular sunsets alone are reason enough to visit Bas-du-Fleuve.

Some even refer to the region as “the capital of sunsets” for its western-facing vantage point combined with the beauty of the river, which makes for stunning sundown sights most days.

The location of our motel provided us with a great view of the sun setting over the water as it dipped below the horizon, lighting up the sky.

There’s so much beauty to be seen in Quebec.

My stay in Bas-Saint-Laurent was rainy (of course, the sun came out and stayed out as soon as we left), but also incredibly memorable.

It showed me how much beauty there is to explore in this giant province I call home — and it made me want to share what I saw with others.

Though Montreal and Quebec City may seem like the obvious choices when traveling to this part of Canada (for good reason), you may also want to consider venturing beyond the big cities to witness what this one-of-a-kind region has to offer.

It took California a century to produce a pistachio harvest. Now, it’s the world’s top supplier. But as the Dubai chocolate trend fuels demand, and California droughts intensify, growers are fighting to keep up.