Dozens of websites, banks and apps are being affected by a major internet outage.
The problem, which started on Monday morning, appears to be related to an issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As of 9.20am, there were more than 2,000 reports of the Amazon Web Services outage in the US alone, according to Downdetector, which monitors issues and outages in real-time.
On its service status page, the company said it was seeing “increased error rates” and delays with “multiple AWS services”.
Here’s what we know so far.
Pic: PA
Pic: PA
Pic: PA
What has been affected?
Multiple banks, the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) website, mobile phone networks and video-chatting platform Zoom are among the websites having technical issues.
All Amazon products – including Prime Video and Amazon Music – have also been affected, as well as the main Amazon website.
Here’s a full list of what has been affected by the internet outage, according to Downdetector:
• Snapchat
• Ring
• Roblox
• Amazon Web Services
• Life360
• My Fitness Pal
• Amazon
• Xero
• Signal
• Canva
• Fortnite
• Blink Security
• Zoom
• HMRC
• Clash Royale
• Clash Of Clans
• Asana
• Wordle
• Slack
• Smartsheet
• Epic Games Store
• Duolingo
• Amazon Alexa
• Jira
• Vodafone
• Tidal
• Coinbase
• Atlassian
• IMDB
• Amazon Prime Video
• Pokemon Go
• BT
• Peloton
• EE
• Ancestry
• Square
• Playstation Network
• Eventbrite
• Amazon Music
• Sky
• Flickr
• Hay Day
• Rocket League
• Perplexity AI
• Dead By Daylight
• Bank Of Scotland
• Lloyds Bank
• Halifax
What has AWS said?
AWS confirmed it was suffering from “increased error rates and latencies” for multiple services.
In a statement on its website, the company said: “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause,” an update on its website says.
“We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
The company is posting regular updates on the situation and said its engineers were “immediately engaged” as soon as they spotted the issue.
Concentrated in the US
ThousandEyes, a website that tracks the performance of local and wide area networks, servers and applications, shows many of the outages appear to be concentrated in the US.
A large portion is focused in Virginia, which is widely considered as the global capital for data centres.
Has something like this happened before?
Entertainment
Harper Lee mystery: Is there a To Kill A Mockingbird prequel and true crime novel ‘waiting to be published’?
One of Harper Lee’s surviving relatives says it’s possible there could be major unpublished works by the author still to be discovered, following the release of eight of her previously unseen short stories.
Describing the mystery around a manuscript titled The Long Goodbye, which Lee wrote before To Kill A Mockingbird, Lee’s nephew, Dr Edwin Conner, told Sky News: “Even the family doesn’t know everything that remains in her papers. So, it could be there waiting to be published.”
Dr Conner says Lee submitted a 111-page manuscript, titled The Long Goodbye, after writing Go Set A Watchman in 1957.
The retired English professor explains: “It’s not clear to me or to others in the family, to what extent [The Long Goodbye] might have been integrated into To Kill a Mockingbird, which she wrote immediately after, or to what extent it was a freestanding manuscript that is altogether different and that might stand to be published in the future.”
Lee researched Reverend Maxwell’s death, but no book was ever published. Pic: AP
A second mystery exists in the form of a true crime novel, The Reverend, which Lee was known to have begun researching in the late 1970s, about Alabama preacher Reverend Willie Maxwell who was accused of five murders before being murdered himself.
Dr Conner said: “The manuscript of a nonfiction piece, that according to some people doesn’t exist, according to others who claim to have seen it, does [is also a mystery]. We don’t know where it is, or whether it is, really.
“That could be a surprise that has yet to be revealed if we discover it and it’s published, which is a real possibility.”
He believes much of the manuscript was written in his family home and says his mother, Louise, who was Lee’s older sister, saw a “finished version of it” on the dining room table.
Dr Conner says there are “others who just as fiercely say no, it was never completed”.
A C Lee (L) – the inspiration for Atticus Finch with his grandchildren, including Edwin Conner (C), in 1953
‘She did want to publish these stories’
There has long been debate over why Lee published just two books in her lifetime.
To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960. Selling more than 46 million copies worldwide, translated into more than 40 languages and winning a Pulitzer Prize, it’s arguably the most influential American book of the 20th century.
Fifty-five years later, Lee published a sequel, Go Set A Watchman, written ahead of Mockingbird, but set at a later date.
Then aged 88, and with failing health, there were questions over how much influence Lee had over the decision to publish.
Asked how happy she’d be to see some of her earliest work, containing early outlines for Mockingbird’s narrator Jean Louise Finch and the story’s hero Atticus Finch, now hitting the shelves, Dr Conner says: “I think she’d be delighted.”
A previously unseen image of one of Lee’s short story transcripts. Pic: Harper Lee Estate
He says Lee had presented them to her first agent, Maurice Crane, at their first meeting in 1956, “precisely because she did want to publish these stories”.
And while dubbing them “apprentice stories,” which he admits “don’t represent her at her best as a writer,” he says they show “literary genius of a kind”.
Notoriously private, he says the stories – which were discovered neatly typed out in one of Lee’s New York apartments after her death – offer “deeply enthralling new glimpses into her as a person”.
Never marrying or having children, he says Lee maintained a degree of privacy even with her family: “You never saw her complete personality… We thought we knew her, we thought we’d seen everything, but no, we hadn’t.”
George W Bush awards Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. Pic: Reuters
‘That’s it, I’m not giving any more interviews’
While describing her as a “complicated woman,” he insists Lee was far from the recluse she’s frequently painted as.
He says: “In company, she was most of the time delightful. She was a lively personality, she was funny, witty, and you would think she was very outgoing.”
But Lee was known to have struggled with her success.
Dr Conner explains: “She never ever wanted fame or celebrity because she suspected, or knew, that would involve the kind of uncomfortable situations in public situations that she found just no satisfaction or pleasure in”.
He says while in the early years of Mockingbird Lee gave interviews, the wild success of the book soon rendered such promotion unnecessary, leading her to decide: “That’s it, I’m not giving any more interviews”.
While he admits she was subsequently much happier, he goes on: “Not that she was a recluse, as some people thought. She wasn’t at all a recluse, but she didn’t enjoy public appearances and interviews particularly. She wanted the work to speak for itself.”
Truman Capote and Harper Lee in April 1963. Pic: AP/The Broadmoor Historic Collection
‘Deeply hurt’ by Truman Capote
Famously close to Truman Capote, one of the pieces in Lee’s newly released collection is a profile of her fellow author.
Dr Conner says that piece – a love-letter of sorts, describing Capote’s literary achievements – is all the more remarkable because at the point Lee wrote it in 1966, when she and Capote “were not even on speaking terms”.
He says Lee “probably knew [Capote] better than any other person alive when that was written”, adding, “she did love him as a friend very much, even when he was not speaking to her”.
Friends since childhood – and the prototype for the character of Dill in Mockingbird – Capote later hired Lee to help him research his 1965 true crime novel In Cold Blood.
Despite his book’s relative success, Dr Conner believes Capote was “bitter” over the fact Mockingbird far eclipsed it in accolades and recognition.
“He had been writing for much longer. He felt that he was at least as good as she was, and he was very envious of her success”.
Dr Conner says Lee was “deeply hurt” at Capote’s rejection of her, never speaking about him in later life.
Recalling his own meeting with Capote many years later, Dr Conner says he “got a personal sense of how [Capote] could charm the socks off of anybody, male or female”.
He says it was noteworthy that while Capote asked about his mother, who he had been fond of, he “never once mentioned” Harper.
Sky News has contacted Lee’s lawyer and the executor of her estate, Tonya Carter, for comment.
The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays, by Harper Lee is on sale from Tuesday
Business
Oil and gas workers offered cash to retrain, in major plan for future clean energy workforce
Ministers have unveiled their flagship plan to train and recruit workers for the booming clean energy sector, which it is hoping to supercharge in the next five years.
Up to £18m of new money has been pledged by the UK and Scottish governments specifically to move those working in the oil and gas sector into new roles.
Their jobs are about to fall off a cliff as the industry declines, with at least 40,000 of the current 115,000 jobs forecast to disappear by the early 2030s.
Almost all of those roles are thought to be fairly easily transferable into green industries – requiring little more than a few months of extra training.
But in the absence of government help, workers have been moving abroad, industry says, taking with them the expertise Britain badly needs to for its new greener energy system.
And it has left them feeling forgotten about after years of working to keep the lights on, and increasingly swayed by Reform UK, both GMB and Unite unions have warned Labour.
Pledge to double green jobs by 2030
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told Sky News that creating jobs in sectors like carbon capture and storage and hydrogen would help “create a future for those in the North Sea communities”.
The new £18m will pay for careers advice, training, and “skills passports” to enable oil and gas workers to make the switch without having to repeat qualifications.
The cash was announced on Sunday in the new Clean Energy Jobs Plan, which details how the government hopes to make good on its promise to double green jobs by 2030.
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Renewables overtake coal for first time
Mr Miliband said in an interview: “This plan shows 400,000 extra jobs in the clean energy economy by 2030.
“This isn’t a target. This is actually what we believe is necessary to meet all the plans we have across the economy.”
The first strategy of its kind hopes to plug the UK’s massive skills gap that threatens to derail the government’s target to green the electricity system by 2030.
It identifies 31 priority occupations that are particularly in demand, such as plumbers, electricians and welders, and lists a target to convert five colleges into new “Technical Excellence Colleges” to train workers.
‘You can’t train people for jobs that aren’t there’
Unions welcomed the plan, but pointed out that skills and training do not equate to new jobs.
They say it will mean nothing without extra money and a revitalised domestic supply chain to build all the green technology needed, from fibreglass wind turbines to aluminium sub-sea cables.
Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary who has threatened to cut ties with Labour over its policy to end North Sea oil and gas drilling and watering down of a ban on zero-hours contracts, welcomed the “initial steps” but called for “an equally ambitious programme of public investment”.
Professor Paul de Leeuw from the Energy Transition Institute in Aberdeen said the plan was “genuinely new and different”, and had for the first time joined up relevant information and strategies in one place.
But “you can’t train people for jobs that aren’t there”, he added, also calling for an investment plan.f
Reform heartlands could benefit from Labour’s jobs plan
The boom in clean energy jobs stands to benefit Reform heartlands along the east coast of Britain.
That fact is more by luck than design, given the east coast’s proximity to offshore wind farms and carbon capture and storage fields in the North Sea.
Reform promises a radically different vision for the country’s future, based on reopening coal mines and maxing out nuclear power and what’s left of North Sea oil and gas to boost jobs and the economy.
Its deputy leader, Richard Tice, objects to land being used for solar panels and pylons.
Government modelling forecasts an additional 35,000 direct jobs in Scotland, 55,000 in the East of England and 50,000 in the North West.
To keep the unions sweet, the government will also have to follow through on its pledge to boost the rights of those working offshore in green energy.
A current loophole gives protections like the minimum wage to oil and gas workers in UK territorial seas, but not to workers in the clean energy sector.
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