Yesterday was a great day for anyone trying to finish their laundry on company time, but a frustrating one if you were trying to do pretty much anything else. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was down, with rippling outages rolling through nearly a third of the internet and affecting thousands of businesses around the globe. In the evening, about 15 hours after the trouble began, Amazon said it had “returned to normal operations.”

What happened? Around 3am ET, outage reports started cropping up. Amazon blamed an error in the DNS system, which does the actual connecting to the site when a user clicks on a link or app. The error came after Amazon pushed a technical update to a database service. Because AWS undergirds ~30% of the web, the problem had a global impact.

Millions of people got error messages

Even as Amazon said it was starting to get things patched up in the morning, the AWS outage continued, peaking around midday, according to Down Detector.

Spinning pinwheels: Banks and financial services apps like Venmo and Robinhood weren’t working. Streaming and gaming sites like HBO Max, Tidal, Roblox, and Fortnite struggled. The Snapchat app was no use all day, and even Wordle wasn’t available.

Amazon also felt the pain:

• Its own e-commerce site and services like Ring and Alexa were reported to be offline.
• Early estimates for how much this outage is going to cost top out around $75 million per hour—with $72 million per hour coming from Amazon itself while its site was down, according to the UK-based UX design firm Tenscope (though AWS generated $107.6 billion in revenue last year, so it can likely afford the hit).

Time to say “we told you so.” Experts are using this massive disruption to point out that this is what happens when most of the internet relies on a few major providers. AWS only has two main competitors: Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform, so if any of them have even a slight hiccup, it becomes everyone’s problem. And it’s not an easy problem to solve, as very few companies could build the infrastructure it takes to power even a fraction of what AWS handles.—MM

US and Australia make rare earths deal to counter China. With China clamping down on the export of rare earth minerals needed to make electronics amid the trade war, President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed an agreement—which the White House described as a “framework”—with plans for projects worth up to $8.5 billion combined. It calls for each country to invest $1 billion in some of those projects within the next six months. But China still dominates, currently controlling 70% of rare earths mining and 90% of the processing, and access to them will likely be a big part of the discussion when Trump meets with China’s Xi Jinping next week.

Trump can send the National Guard to Portland, appeals court rules. Overturning a lower court’s ruling barring the president from deploying National Guard troops to Portland, OR, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling yesterday that the president had likely “lawfully exercised his statutory authority.” The lower court judge had found that President Trump’s justification that Portland was like a war zone, so troops needed to be sent to quell protests at an ICE facility, was “untethered to the facts,” but the appeals court majority said that the administration’s view was entitled to more deference. The dissenting judge, however, called that both “absurd” and unconstitutional. However, a second lower court order continues to prevent Trump from sending troops for now.

Disney streamer unsubscribes doubled amid Kimmel suspension. The numbers are out, and it looks like Disney+ and Hulu took a big hit in September when Disney yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air over comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s murder. Subscription-analytics company Antenna found that Disney+ cancellations doubled in September to 8% from 4% in August, while Hulu defections spiked to 10% from 5%—with some 3 million subscribers ditching Disney+ and 4.1 million cancelling Hulu. That’s an unusually big change for streaming services, whose cancellation rates are usually pretty steady. Ratings for Jimmy Kimmel Live! have been up since the host’s return.—AR

Apple’s stock is giddier than an 11-year-old who just strong-armed their parents into buying them a smartphone. The iPhone maker hit a new all-time high yesterday after news of strong global demand for the iPhone 17 led another investment bank to give Apple’s stock two thumbs up.

Shares of Apple climbed nearly 4% to close at ~$262, surpassing the company’s previous all-time high of $259 from last December:

• Over the weekend, Counterpoint Research reported that the iPhone 17 lineup outsold the iPhone 16 lineup by 14% in the US and China during its first 10 days in each market.
• Yesterday, Loop Capital upgraded Apple from a “hold” to a “buy,” and pumped its price target from $226 to $315. The day before, Evercore ISI re-added $AAPL to its “Tactical Outperform List” after removing it in early 2024 over soft revenue projections.

This is a much-needed autumnal boost for Apple, which has had a bumpy year due to a muted reaction to the iPhone 16—largely because of delays to its AI features—and on-again, off-again tariff fears. Before yesterday, its stock was only up ~3% this year, making it the second-worst performer in the Magnificent Seven (after Amazon).

Still…some analysts aren’t sure Apple can maintain the iPhone 17’s initial sales surge. Based on usual purchase cycles, it may have simply been time for pandemic-era phone buyers to upgrade, Sherwood reported.—ML

Like a commuter checking Uber availability while waiting for a delayed bus, NASA might turn to SpaceX’s competitors to help it get humans back to the moon.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC yesterday that SpaceX is behind schedule on its $3 billion NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon using its jumbo Starship rocket—and said the space agency will consider other companies for the mission now slated for 2028. Duffy mentioned Jeff Bezos’s rocket-maker Blue Origin as a potential contender.

SpaceX rivals’ shares popped on the news: Rocket Lab was up 1.6%, Intuitive Machines rose 4%, and Karman soared 4.3%.

Moonshot misfires

SpaceX is a key player in NASA’s Artemis III mission to beat China’s goal of sending humans to explore the potentially resource-rich south pole of the moon by 2030. But the Star-Spangled Banner’s lunar ETA keeps going up:

• SpaceX’s work-in-progress Starship exploded in three of the last five test flights.
• Critics also blame deadline slippage on SpaceX’s experimental flight plan—which includes refueling Starship during midflight and a risky lunar landing of a 165-foot rocket.

Looking ahead…Some former NASA officials say they don’t expect Space X to be ready for Artemis III before 2032, according to the New York Times.—SK

Peanuts may still be treated like Public Enemy No. 1 at elementary schools, but updated medical guidelines that recommended feeding the legume to children when they’re young has significantly reduced potentially life-threatening peanut allergies.

A new study published yesterday in the journal Pediatrics found ~60,000 kids were spared developing a peanut allergy since guidance was issued in 2015 telling parents to introduce the food to babies as young as 4 months. Doctors had previously advised against giving peanuts to children before they turned 3 years old. But according to the study:

• Peanut allergies in children aged 0–3 fell by 27% after parents of high-risk children were given the new guidance in 2015.
• These allergies dropped by more than 40% when those guidelines were broadened to all kids in 2017.
• Since then, eggs replaced peanuts as the most common allergy in children.

“I can actually come to you today and say there are less kids with food allergy today than there would have been if we hadn’t implemented this public health effort,” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. David Hill, who authored the study, told the Associated Press. It’s also been a boon to parents who can’t come up with anything more creative than PB&J for lunch.—AR