Amazon Web Services (AWS) is currently experiencing a major outage that has taken down online services, including Amazon, Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, and more. The AWS status checker is reporting that multiple services are “impacted” by operational issues, and that the company is “investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region” — though outages are also impacting services in other regions globally.
Users on Reddit are reporting that the Alexa smart assistant is down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests, and in my own experience, I found that routines like pre-set alarms are not functioning. The AWS issue also appears to be impacting platforms running on its cloud network, including Perplexity, Airtable, Canva, and the McDonalds app. The cause of the outage hasn’t been confirmed, and it’s unclear when regular service will be restored.
“Perplexity is down right now,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X. “The root cause is an AWS issue. We’re working on resolving it.”
The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting the US-EAST-1 Region at 3:11AM ET. “We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said in an update published at 3:51AM ET.
The service provides cloud-computing and API services to major websites, popular apps, and platforms across the world. It means that users have been experiencing issues across a huge swath of the internet as the UK starts its working week.
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We will be keeping an updating list of websites, apps, games, and more than are impacted. It includes:
Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode. It’s a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part of the latest Windows update. A new bug discovered in Windows 11’s October build, KB5066835, makes it so that your USB keyboard and mouse stop working entirely, so you cannot interact with the recovery UI at all.
This problem has already been recognized and highlighted by Microsoft, who clarified that a fix is on its way to address this issue. Any plugged-in peripherals will continue to work just fine inside the actual operating system, but as soon as you go into Windows RE, your USB keyboard and mouse will become unresponsive. It’s important to note that if your PC fails to start-up for any reason, it defaults to the recovery environment to, you know, recover and diagnose any issues that might’ve been preventing it from booting normally.
Note that those hanging onto old PS/2-connector equipped keyboards and mice seem to be unaffected by this latest Windows software gaffe.
If you twist something — say, spin a top or rotate a robot’s arm — and want it to return to its exact starting point, intuition says you’d need to undo every twist one by one. But mathematicians Jean-Pierre Eckmann from the University of Geneva and Tsvi Tlusty from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) have found a surprising shortcut. As they describe in a new study, nearly any sequence of rotations can be perfectly undone by scaling its size and repeating it twice.
Like a mathematical Ctrl+Z, this trick sends nearly any rotating object back to where it began.
“It is actually a property of almost any object that rotates, like a spin or a qubit or a gyroscope or a robotic arm,” Tlusty told New Scientist. “If [objects] go through a highly convoluted path in space, just by scaling all the rotation angles by the same factor and repeating this complicated trajectory twice, they just return to the origin.”
A Hidden Symmetry of Motion
A random walk on SO(3) shown as a trajectory in a ball of radius π, where a rotation R(n,ω) is mapped to the point r=nω and antipodal points are identified, nπ = −nπ (the real projective space RP3). The walk traverses from the center (small red sphere) to the blue end. Crossing antipodal points is indicated by dotted lines. Credit: Physical Review Letters.
Mathematicians represent rotations using a space called SO(3) — a three-dimensional map where every point corresponds to a unique orientation. At the very center lies the identity rotation: the object’s original state. Normally, retracing a complex path through this space wouldn’t bring you back to that center. But Eckmann and Tlusty found that scaling all rotation angles by a single factor before repeating the motion twice acts like a geometric reset.
So for example:
If your first rotation sequence tilted the object 75 degrees this way, 20 degrees that way, and so on, you could shrink all those angles by, say, a factor of 0.3, and then run that shortened version two times in a row.
After those two runs, the object returns perfectly to its starting position — as if nothing had ever happened.
In their proof, the researchers blended a 19th-century tool for combining rotations (Rodrigues’ rotation formula) with Hermann Minkowski’s theorem from number theory. Together, these revealed that “almost every walk in SO(3) or SU(2), even a very complicated one, will preferentially return to the origin simply by traversing the walk twice in a row and uniformly scaling all rotation angles.”
Why This Matters
Why should you care, though? Well, rotations are everywhere: in gyroscopes, MRI machines, and quantum computers. Any technique that can reliably “reset” them could have broad uses. In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for example, atomic nuclei constantly spin in magnetic fields. Small errors in those spins can blur the resulting images. The new insight could help engineers design sequences that cleanly undo unwanted rotations.
Quantum devices, built around spinning qubits, might also benefit. Since qubits evolve through quantum rotations described by SU(2), a universal reset rule could help stabilize computations. “No matter how tangled the history of rotations,” Tlusty said in the UNIST press release, “there exists a simple recipe: rescale the driving force and apply it twice.”
And in robotics, the principle might enable machines that can roll or pivot endlessly without drifting off course. “Imagine if we had a robot that could morph between any solid body shape, it could then follow any desired path simply through morphing of shape,” said Josie Hughes of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in an interview with New Scientist.
As Eckmann put it, the discovery shows “how rich mathematics can be even in a field as well-trod as the study of rotations.” It’s a rare kind of elegance: a universal law that hides in plain sight, waiting for someone to give the world a gentle twist — and then do it again.
