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Computer says no, i had a shift at 3 30 am.
There were people standing outside like the whole store is down.
What happened was an overload of the internal routing and rerouting systems.
It's world business report from the bbc world service.
This is Andrew Peach.
On the way.
We'll hear how hundreds of websites and apps were knocked offline and when they'll be back to normal.
Also today, a five-year plan for China's economy and billions of dollars of investment in San Francisco.
Let's start though with that disruption to the internet around the world today.
Dozens of major companies reported significant disruptions overnight.
Massive outage.
It's hit hundreds of popular websites and apps.
Maybe you noticed this morning.
A major global outage impacting so many popular websites and apps like Amazon Alexa Snapchat, Fortnite.
Amazon's cloud computing firm, says there are still problems now for some services after that outage that knocked out hundreds of websites and apps Snapchat Duolingo Roblox, among them.
This Amazon worker in the US detailed the disruption when she got to work early this morning.
I had a shift at 3.30 a.m., and when I got here at 3.20, there were people standing outside.
I'm trying to sign into my app, and it's not working.
I'm walking up and I hear the people from inside saying that the app is down, like the whole store is down.
After more than six hours of disruption, some apps did come back online, but businesses are saying they'd already lost money by that point.
Here's Mario Stanchev, director of Archer's Pest Control in London, who says it's cost him up to 4000.
So what happened today?
This morning, for about five hours till midday, We had a massive outrage of our software that we're using for our company, including mainly the phone servers related to Amazon.
So we were unable to take calls and make calls for five hours and a half, which have caused a major disruption in how we do our businesses.
At the same time, we also lost the profit of one to three thousand pounds and lots of opportunities, because we continue to advertise and people were calling us.
We were paying for the leads.
They were calling us but we couldn't.
Live to our North America technology correspondent, Lily Jamali.
Let me ask you first, Lily, what's the situation now?
It is fluid.
We've been monitoring Amazon's updates, which are coming fast and furious every 30 to 60 minutes.
And what's interesting is that earlier in the morning my time Pacific time here in California it felt like much of this had been resolved.
And then on certain websites, if you look at Down Detector, you could see a second spike of problems, Reddit being just one example, while others seem to have been just fine.
So the issue here is that it seems like there may have been some cascading issues that the Either Amazon wasn't initially aware of or, you know, they may have cropped up in the aftermath of this, and they continue to work on that.
They said more soon, you know, basically in the next two hours.
They say that on their end, much of these issues should be resolved.
But we'll see.
It's not believed to be a hack.
So what is this?
Yeah, that's always the first concern, isn't it?
That this may have been a cybersecurity issue of some kind.
And by and large, that has been ruled out.
This is a DNS issue, a domain name system.
And this is basically a map that AWS and other cloud computing providers use to direct traffic to various apps.
It appears that this problem was concentrated in that realm.
There's a backlog of these requests that Amazon is trying to work through right now, from what we understand.
And they're trying to de-throttle as much of the inner workings of AWS as they can right now.
Right.
And I mean, is the story really it's remarkable it doesn't fall over more often?
Well, what I've been learning in talking to computer science experts today and I think a lot of us in this space knew this already is that these outages happen all the time.
It's just that not every outage is on this scale or maybe gets this much media attention.
We're seeing these impacts really hitting consumers.
We heard from some business owners, especially smaller business owners who may be interacting.
We don't...
This is pretty widespread.
But what I'm hearing from computer scientists is that yes, some of the problem certainly resides with Amazon here, and we're going to see this play out in the courts in the next couple of weeks, I would presume, and months.
But some of the problem also relies with respect to the developers of these apps trying to build in mitigations and redundancies to make sure that when The next big outage happens, that they are prepared.
We saw this with CrowdStrike last year.
Remember that huge outage in July of 2024?
Delta Airlines is still trying to claw back something on the order of, you know, 500 million to make up for the problems that started with CrowdStrike but really exposed some problems within Delta's own systems.
Lily, thank you very much indeed.
Now live from California to Illinois.
Peter Jankowskis, Vice President of Research and Analysis at Arbor Financial Services, is in Chicago.
Peter, with all this going on, Amazon seems to have survived unscathed in the markets.
Indeed, it was up for the entire day, finished the day up pretty close to its high, about 1.6%.
So really no impact at all on the stock price.
I think they're probably getting high marks for it not being a cyber attack in any way.
And and for jumping right on top of it and trying to fix it.
So the markets are basically judging this as, you know, stuff happens.
Yeah, at the moment, at the moment.
We'll see how it plays out if there's lawsuits and such down the line.
But for the moment, they're treating it as, well, that sort of thing happens.
More with Peter on the way very shortly.
Now to China, to Beijing, where leaders are gathering for one of the most important meetings in years, with China wrestling with a sluggish economy and, of course, sometimes a trade war with the US.
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is forming the basis of China's next foreign five-year plan, setting out goals for the rest of the decade for the world's second biggest economy, with global repercussions potentially.
Our China correspondent Stephen McDonnell is in the city.
After four days we'll get a communique that tells us what they've decided and also, I suppose a few days later, a copy of the new five-year plan.
But other than that, we won't know anything because it's all behind closed doors.
So there's Xi Jinping at the top.
He's General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Under him is the Politburo Standing Committee, seven people.
Below that's the Politburo, two dozen people.
Now, they're meeting all the time to run the country.
Now, the central committee is who is meeting today.
The hundreds of those delegates have the next four days.
But the extent to which they're really going to be debating the economy and policy and sort of tinkering with the five-year plan or just possibly rubber stamping a plan that's already been approved.
We really don't know, because it's completely opaque, apparently so opaque that the delegates to this plenum stay on site.
They don't even leave the site, the hotel where it's taking place, for fear that something will leak out.
Now, household debt in China has been surging in the last couple of decades from about 10 of GDP to over 60.
That leaves between 25 and 35 million people possibly defaulting on their debt.
But are they about to be offered some kind of benefit? bailout.
This is Mr Lin.
Mr Lin is a business owner in his 60s.
He's in Shanghai.
He got into huge debts after the pandemic.
Our total debt was close to $3 million.
The court formally declared the company bankrupt.
In my case, I personally guaranteed a $300,000 bank loan, so that made me personally liable.
And because Mr Lin had guaranteed some of the company loans.
His creditors then took him to court and he ended up serving time in jail.
It's hard seven or eight people sharing a 20 square metre cell, living and sleeping there for 15 days.
A few of the others in the cell were also in debt.
One man owed just $4,000.
The court told him to pay within 20 minutes or be detained.
He offered to pay a few hundred but said he couldn't pay more.
They rejected this and locked him up.
If you're ruled to have the means but refuse to pay, it's considered resisting court judgment a criminal offence.
I didn't commit fraud.
Businesses succeed or fail, that's reality.
But if it were personal borrowing and I refused to repay, that'd be different.
So for more on the challenges facing China's economy being discussed this week, I've been talking to Daniel Senga, who's the managing partner at Wilson Partners, which is a financial advisory firm in Shanghai.
On the financial side, it's something that we would always like to see more progress made.
The issues there are the property bubble, how to deal with it.
They're trying to engineer a long bull, try to create a wealth effect to make people feel better.
But that's very much of a Beijing engineered thing.
The more important thing is industrial.
China is still focusing too much on industrialization.
However, those are the areas that need attention, both in productivity and value add.
And what I mean by the productivity.
You might have heard a lot of this anti-intervolution concept, which is really code for overcapacity.
But Beijing will never use that word.
The numbers today suggest it's grown by 4.8% compared with the same period last year.
That's its weakest growth in a year.
And yet it's growth that a lot of countries around the world be quite envious of.
True.
But in reality, although most of the population is now in urban areas, there's a significant amount of people in the rural areas that still need development.
It is something that has lagged behind and they need to address that population.
Obviously, in terms of economic planning, the great advantage I suppose China has is they can just think about the economics without having to worry about the politics so much.
They don't have to meet the electoral cycle that most countries are facing.
Very true.
However, that 1989 contract since Tenement Square, where you stay out of politics, we will make you rich.
And most people became rich through property.
That's no longer a vehicle to become rich in.
So they need something else.
They want to engineer a stock market or some kind of financial system to give better returns.
But that hasn't succeeded to levels that they would like right now.
So they're very conscious of how do they create wealth or reasonable wealth for the people.
Where are they on the U.S.-China tensions?
The U.S.
Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, has talked about the possibility of a meeting between Donald Trump and Trump.
Xi Jinping and whether that might happen maybe later this month, as soon as that.
Is that something that China is worried about focused on, or is that just part of the noise you referred to?
That is very much part of the noise.
So China is very open to have a session.
They do want to.
They actually do need to come up with some kind of agreement with the U.S.
But the U.S. only accounts for about 14% of exports for China now.
So it's become.
I don't want to.
Obviously it's not insignificant, but it's something that they could dig in and hold out for.
What they would really like to see is more foreign investment. through US and other countries.
And China also, is looking at the world and thinking there are lots of parts of it they'd like to invest in, to be influential in, and they might be benefiting from the fact that the US is starting to look more inward.
It shouldn't be conflated with the Western idea of globalization.
China indeed wants to globalize, but it's very much to globalize to obtain resources, sell product, but it's not necessarily to influence cultures, even though if there's, There's been examples of that.
China is just too focused on themselves.
That's Daniel Singer with me from Shanghai.
Hi, I'm Simon Jack.
I'm Xing Xing.
And Good Bad Billionaire is back for a new season.
Delving into the lives and livelihoods of more of the world's billionaires.
Like the owner of Russia's largest online retailer, Wild Berries, she's Russia's first self-made female billionaire.
Tatiana Kim.
The action movie icon and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And the co-founder of Snapchat, a billionaire at just 25 years old, Evan Spiegel.
Simon and I are asking you to decide if they're good, bad or just another billionaire.
That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.
Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
And let's talk a bit more to Peter Jankowskis now in Chicago.
Since I had that conversation with Daniel, we've got a bit more detail on the idea of Trump-she, which we now think might be early next year.
And Donald Trump is particularly keen to sell some soybeans.
Yes, indeed.
You know that is, the farmers here in the United States are a group that are feeling some pressure from China pulling back on those farmers imports.
And he's talked about perhaps having some sort of a stimulus plan to help them in the short run.
So anything he can pull off in that regard would be a big win for him.
Okay, because soybean futures are trading very high at the moment.
Just talk us through that.
Well, I think there is a great speculation that the deal will go through, in which case, of course, there would be an increased demand for the soybeans that are out there.
It is interesting hearing Daniel say that China's not interested in noise when it comes to economic planning, and that's basically what they think most of what comes out of the US is.
Well, I'd be surprised that that is the truth, if you will.
I suspect that they have a greater desire to reach a deal, but they certainly are ones that are not willing to simply give in.
So some of that, I think, is a negotiating posture on their part.
They do have excess capacity and excess production.
And I don't think they can afford to overlook any markets in that case.
Let's talk about Apple, because Apple shares hit an all time high in the markets on Monday.
Yes, indeed.
They've seen some really good sales numbers for the latest iPhone, the version 17 iPhone, and that's really caused a surge in the stock.
OK.
I mean, obviously we know Apple's a really successful company, but it's going some to maintain that you know, month after month, year after year.
It is.
But a key to their cycle always is when they introduce a new model of the iPhone, when they've had a substantial upgrade.
That really gives them a jolt.
I think it represents more than 50% of their revenue overall, so...
To really move the needle for the company overall, they have to see more iPhone sales.
And just a quick word about Netflix, another huge name.
They've got results out on Tuesday.
Yes, that stock actually had a pretty big day in anticipation of those numbers being good.
It was up more than 3% today.
I think people are looking for a continuation of their strong subscriber growth in a tribute to their strength as a brand.
They've actually been increasing subscribers, as they've been making it more difficult for people to share or take their service for free by borrowing from friends and relatives.
So it really goes to show that they have a strong product and they can monetize that strength.
Peter, thank you very much indeed.
Now, how many times on World Business Report have we talked about record gold prices?
Last week, we were talking about $4,300.
So long ago, we were talking about records at $3,000.
Now, investors are looking for safe havens, of course, amid economic uncertainty.
Meanwhile Diwali is underway, the Hindu festival next, five days in which gold is gifted to bring luck and prosperity.
So my colleague Davina Gupta has been to one of the world's biggest gold markets in Delhi to find out how shoppers and businesses... are coping with these high prices.
I'm at a jewellery store, and around me there are shelves with intricate pieces of bangles, rings and necklaces, and it's packed with customers.
Because it's a festive season and traditionally families buy gold for weddings and for good luck at this time.
But the price jump globally for gold is hard to miss.
So are customers ready to pay more or cutting back?
Let's find out.
We've come up for shopping for the wedding of our daughter, you know, coming up next month.
So price is no concern or how do you put a budget?
Well, yes.
We have to think of the price ultimately, you know.
But then, yes, we have no option, you know.
So some things have to be worked up or compromised.
So what are you compromising on?
Maybe we may not go for that heavy, you know, because nowadays kids don't want to wear very heavy jewellery also.
I'm looking for some discounts around making charges, which is typically over and above the gold value for today.
I bought a ring for my wife, her birthday is coming.
Yeah, I can understand the price of change.
So my budget this time was low.
Earlier I was buying, you know, gold more than 10, 15 grams.
This time I purchased for platinum, which is, you know, comparatively cheaper.
So clearly, many people here are trying to adjust their budget, as the jewellery is definitely costing more this year.
And just to give you an idea, I'm holding a gold necklace which has a beautiful traditional design.
This would have cost around $5,000 last year, but now it's 50% more expensive.
It's a similar story for many pieces here.
And that's why big jewelry brands are now finding creative ways to draw customers in.
The idea is not to increase prices but to unlock the access for consumers.
Shalini Gupta is the regional head of Tanishq, a jewellery brand owned by the Tata Group in Delhi.
So we are doing a gold exchange.
The kind of gold exchange we've never done before, that anything above 9 carat consumers can come and exchange with no deduction.
And the amount of sale that is coming on the back of gold exchange has also gone up for us from last year.
But some shoppers are switching to alternatives like silver.
So this is the coin that we're doing for the baby boy.
A neat jeweler, Shobhit Verma, in Delhi, who's rolling out new gifting options like silver coins to tap into the shift.
Silver will be a part of every jewellery store now.
Earlier it wasn't like that.
So we're seeing the changing trend.
Silver is definitely increasing market share.
Away from the showrooms, there are also investors who are betting big on digital gold through exchange-traded funds or ETFs.
According to the World Gold Council, gold ETFs in India saw their biggest ever investments in September.
These are essentially stocks backed by physical gold.
One of them is Akshay Khatri in Delhi.
Why did I choose to invest in digital gold?
Specifically, it's because it's easy to invest.
You can invest at the push of a button.
You can redeem at the push of a button.
I don't have to worry about security.
I don't have to worry about storing things in lockers.
I don't have to worry about purity or being potentially, you know, having to buy something.
Check the make and manufacture of certain point of gold.
But here's the catch.
India imports billions of dollars worth of gold every year.
And experts warn because of gold prices going up, India's import bill is set to rise as well.
And this in turn could widen the trade deficit and push up inflation, potentially dimming the shine on the world's fastest growing major economy.
Davina Gupta in Delhi.
Now back to California where we started.
Crime rates in San Francisco have fallen to their lowest in decades.
More people are heading back downtown.
OpenAI are investing. billions of dollars in San Francisco.
So are the businesses there noticing a difference?
I think they are.
I've been talking to Laurie Thomas, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, the owner of Rose's Cafe.
Well, I think that 2025 has been a much more positive year than we've seen in the Doors opening in Union Square, and we just had an amazing sales week for a lot of our restaurant members because the Salesforce conference was in town and that brought, I think, over 50000 people to the city.
And what's your sense as to why that is?
There are suddenly a lot of people in the city with money to spend.
We're blessed to have a lot of tech influence.
Particularly the AI sector is driving a lot of the rebound.
Also, I think the change in the mayor administration and the really the focus on trying to help businesses, all businesses, but certainly in particular the restaurant and hospitality businesses, change.
There was a lot of focus on cleaning up San Francisco.
Things have continued to only get better.
And I think we've seen that in the reopenings that we've seen, particularly in our sort of core or core hospitality zone.
There's been a lot of emphasis on cleaning. clean and safe and a lot of businesses have reopened.
You know, we have a long way to go, no doubt, but the mental positivity is palatable.
It's amazing how it snowballs, isn't it?
You know, you've got more people in the city.
They've got more money to spend.
The tech sector is booming.
Some restrictions have been lifted.
And then that makes more people want to come because it's a nice environment to be in.
And, you know, so it goes on.
Yeah, and I think there's a lot of focus on just basic things that we see in Europe a lot, but sometimes not so much here, where the streets are cleaned and they're being power washed.
And, you know, it feels more positive.
And we've had a lot of our customers Tell us that.
Hey, we just visited, you know, and San Francisco feels like it's coming back.
And so it's, you know, reality and it's perception and it's people giving the city another chance.
And that's what we need.
We need customers and we need workers.
That's Laurie Thomas in San Francisco.
Ted Egan is the city's chief economist.
Ted, give me your take on what's going on in the city right now.
Well, I would just echo a lot of what Laurie said.
I mean, I think that a couple of years ago, people counted San Francisco out.
They said the city was in a doom loop and that its best years were behind it.
And I think AI has completely changed the game.
It's not surprising.
We've long been the tech capital here in Silicon Valley Bay Area, San Francisco.
But it has really helped our growth in the past year, year and a half.
OK, so the boom in AI with firms there means that the economy is doing well.
There are more employees.
People have got more money in their pocket, more desire to go and spend it in a restaurant or whatever.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that is the dynamic.
We have people moving to San Francisco again.
We have the fastest growing apartment rents in the country over the past year.
The youth population is growing.
It seems like the AI companies really want people in the office and the workers want to live near the office.
So that is driving a new sense of vitality where those companies are located.
I think people in many other parts of the world are just catching up with the fact that San Francisco had these problems because it's seen as being such a desirable city with the Golden Gate Bridge, and all of that in Northern California.
Well, it's always had those things.
And I think the negatives about San Francisco, frankly, were overplayed during the pandemic.
We did have a lot of jobs lost during COVID.
The city took a very, very cautious attitude towards COVID and had the lowest COVID death rate of any city in the United States.
But at the cost of that was, you know, we did have a deeper shutdown.
Remote work has affected us more than other places.
We did have a rash of tech layoffs in the past couple of years.
And it seemed to be a number of things sort of all hitting us at once.
But you're right.
The fundamentals of San Francisco are just amazing.
And it'll always be a place people want to come to.
And is this economic health we're describing now?
Is that vulnerable to this notion of the AI thing being a bit of a bubble that could burst?
I mean, I think in the short run you have to recognize that being a tech center means accepting that volatility.
And yeah, we've seen boom and bust cycles in the past.
I do think, though, as I was saying, it's not an accident that the innovation is happening here.
The R&D is happening here.
We've long had a strength in that.
And I think, regardless of what happens in the short term with AI, it's going to be a long term strength for us.
Ted, thank you.
That's Ted Egan in San Francisco.
Online, bbc.com slash news.
News of people cancelling Disney Plus.
After that brief cancellation of the TV host, Jimmy Kimmel, bbccom slash news.
For more from me, Andrew Peach and the World Business Report team.
Thank you very much for listening.
Hi, I'm Simon Jack.
I'm Xing Xing.
And Good Bad Billionaire is back for a new season.
Delving into the lives and livelihoods of more of the world's billionaires.
Like the owner of Russia's largest online retailer, Wild Berries, she's Russia's first self-made female billionaire.
And the co-founder of Snapchat, a billionaire at just 25 years old, Evan Spiegel.
Simon and I are asking you to decide if they're good, bad or just another billionaire.
That's good bad billionaire from the BBC World Service.
Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
