Amazon says Web Services are recovering after outage hits millions of users – as it happened

AWS has issued another update, saying that is continues to “observe recovery across all AWS services.”It added that it is succeeding across multiple “Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions.”AWS went on to say: “For Lambda, customers may face intermittent function errors for functions making network requests to other services or systems as we work to address residual network connectivity issues. To recover Lambda’s invocation errors, we slowed down the rate of SQS polling via Lambda Event Source Mappings. We are now increasing the rate of SQS polling as we experience more successful invocations and reduced function errors

Labour’s clean energy plan needs a revamp: get real on costs and ignore the artificial deadline | Nils Pratley

“I know my job is to get bills down by £300,” said Ed Miliband, the energy security secretary, in his BBC interview at the weekend, acknowledging that the government is on the hook for its pre-election promise to reduce energy bills by 2030.The problem, though, is that the bill-cutting task also seems to be falling by default to Rachel Reeves, the chancellor. It is beginning to look as if the only sure way to make energy bills fall by £300 by 2030 is to shuffle a chunk of the expense into general taxation. Miliband hinted the 5% VAT charge on bills could be removed in next month’s budget, which would cost the government £2.5bn

Amazon Web Services outage shows internet users ‘at mercy’ of too few providers, experts say

Experts have warned of the perils of relying on a small number of companies for operating the global internet after a glitch at Amazon’s cloud computing service brought down apps and websites around the world.The affected platforms included Snapchat, Roblox, Signal and Duolingo as well as a host of Amazon-owned operations including its main retail site and the Ring doorbell company.More than 2,000 companies worldwide have been affected, according to Downdetector, a site that monitors internet outages, with 8.1m reports of problems from users including 1.9m reports in the US, 1m in the UK and 418,000 in Australia

‘Every kind of creative discipline is in danger’: Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI

He is one of the most prolific writers in publishing, averaging more than a novel a year. But even Michael Connelly, the author of the bestselling Lincoln Lawyer series, feared he might fall behind when writing about AI.Connelly’s eighth novel in the series, to be released on Tuesday, centres on a lawsuit against an AI company whose chatbot told a 16-year-old boy that it was OK for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for being unfaithful.But as he was writing, he witnessed the technology altering the way the world worked so rapidly that he feared his plot might become out of date.“You don’t have to lick your finger and hold it up to the wind to know that AI is a massive change that’s coming to science, culture, medicine, everything,” he said

Outsiders steal headlines at Ascot and the shocks are coming more often

Pandemic-era change to system for compiling starting prices looks to be costing those who bet on favouritesCalandagan’s impressive defeat of Ombudsman in the Champion Stakes at Ascot may well turn out to have been the best race anywhere on the planet this year when the final ratings are totted up in January, but it was not the reason why Champions Day made a brief but welcome appearance on the BBC’s main evening news bulletin on Saturday evening.Instead, it was the 200-1 success of Powerful Glory in the Champions Sprint earlier on the card which caught the sports editor’s eye, and understandably so. In the same way that, even now, Leicester’s Premier League title success in 2015-16 is rarely mentioned without reference to the 5,000-1 on offer at the start of the season, it was a case of a starting price being worth a thousand words.The 100-1 success of Cicero’s Gift in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes an hour later only added to the sense that we must all have been looking at the form book upside down. Two winners at a three-figure starting price on the same card? Preposterous

Red Bull fined £43,000 after team member tries to tamper with Lando Norris grid tape

Red Bull have been fined £43,000 after a member of the team broke regulations in an act of gamesmanship at the US Grand Prix, when attempting to remove a piece of tape from the pit wall placed there by McLaren to aid their driver Lando Norris in lining up correctly on the grid.The incident was an unusual example of low-level skulduggery between teams as Red Bull were caught out by CCTV cameras trackside and the race stewards issued the fine for events which took place just before the off.Norris was lined up in second place behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on the grid at Austin, where Verstappen went on to win. Some teams will use a piece of tape attached vertically to the trackside pit wall as a marking indicator for drivers of their grid box.With visibility from the car very limited, especially of the markings on the grid itself, it is a visual aid for the driver to ensure they are positioned correctly for the start