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By Deborah Mary Sophia and Shubham Kalia (Reuters) -Amazon's cloud services unit AWS was struggling to recover on Monday from a widespread outage that knocked out thousands of websites along with some of the world's most popular apps – Snapchat and Reddit – and disrupted businesses globally. The turmoil marked the largest internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. After more than six hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 10:00 a.m. ET (1400 GMT). But AWS acknowledged it was still experiencing elevated errors. "We can confirm significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services … We are investigating," AWS said in the latest update on its status page. To aid the recovery, AWS said it was putting in place limits on the number of requests that can be made on its platform. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilised, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides on-demand computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms that rely on its cloud infrastructure. AWS is the largest cloud provider in the world, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. AWS said on its status page that Monday's outage originated at its US-EAST-1 location in northern Virginia, its oldest and largest for web services. The site suffered previous outages in 2021 and 2020. Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. Junade Ali, a software engineer, cyber expert and Fellow at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said the issue appeared to be with one of the networking systems AWS uses to control a database product. "As this issue can usually be resolved centrally … unless there are further issues identified, the issue should be able to be mitigated over the coming hours," he said. HOURS LATER, A ROCKY RECOVERY Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. Snapchat, for instance, last had over 7,700 reports on Downdetector, up from about 4,000 reports earlier, but still lower than the peak of more than 22,000. AI startup Perplexity, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and trading app Robinhood all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS. Amazon's own services, including its shopping website, Prime Video and Alexa, were also hit, although Downdetector last showed a decrease in severity. Fortnite, owned by Epic Games, along with Clash Royale and Clash of Clans were among the gaming platforms affected. Uber rival Lyft was also knocked down in the United States. In a post on X, Signal's President Meredith Whittaker confirmed the messaging app was hit by the outage as well, though billionaire Elon Musk, who owns X, said his platform continued to work. OUTAGE EXPOSES RISK OF DEPENDENCE ON HANDFUL OF PROVIDERS In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were also facing issues, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and how reliant they now are on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch causing havoc with business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "The main reason for this issue is that all these big companies have relied on just one service," said Nishanth Sastry, Director of Research at the University of Surrey's Department of Computer Science. While there has been no indication yet of a potential cyberattack behind Monday's outage, the scale of the disruption has fed speculation. "When anything like this happens, the concern that it's a cyber incident is understandable," said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at cybersecurity firm Sophos. "AWS has a far-reaching and intricate footprint, so any issue can cause a major upset." (Reporting by Shubham Kalia, Devika Nair, Ananya Palyekar and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by James Pearson and Jaspreet Singh; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Joe Bavier)

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By Hannah Lang and Stefano Rebaudo (Reuters) -The dollar edged up against the yen on Monday as investors shifted their focus to political developments in Japan and the euro area, while U.S. credit risk concerns lingered. The yen weakened as hardline conservative Sanae Takaichi is almost certain to become Japan's first female prime minister after a decisive parliamentary vote.  Her expected premiership, backed by a new coalition with the right-wing Japan Innovation Party, has raised investor concerns over potential fiscal expansion, which could weigh on the yen. "Market participants will now be watching closely to see what fiscal plans are put together by the new coalition government," said MUFG senior currency economist Lee Hardman. The dollar was up 0.03% to 150.535 yen, after hitting 151.20 earlier in the session. Bank of Japan board member Hajime Takata, who voted against keeping rates steady in September, reiterated on Monday his case for resuming hikes, giving the Japanese currency some support.  Japan's benchmark Nikkei stock index closed more than 3% higher, hitting an all-time peak. [.T] The BOJ next decides monetary policy on October 30, with market-implied odds of a quarter-point rate increase at 23%, LSEG data shows. The euro edged slightly higher against the dollar as French political tensions eased, but investor caution lingered. Markets have yet to fully price out French risk from the euro, with the government’s decision to freeze pension reform offering only a temporary political breather. The euro was up 0.06% at $1.1659. U.S. stock indexes ended higher on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump said his proposed 100% tariffs on China would not be sustainable, while upbeat quarterly results from regional banks helped ease credit risk concerns. After a turbulent week in which some regional U.S. banks flagged bad loan and fraud issues, investors are now awaiting more earnings to check for signs of wider sector strain. The U.S. dollar index, a measure of its value relative to a basket of other major foreign currencies, fell 0.047% to 98.489. It hit 98.025 on Friday, its lowest level since October 6. "The immediate danger seems to have passed as investors are convinced that the bankruptcies, bad loans and fraud accusations are all isolated incidents, and not part of widespread failings within the banking sector," David Morrison, senior market analyst at Trade Nation, said in a note. Economists said the dollar's resilience will be tested on multiple fronts. "One, the government shutdown is hurting economic activity, both directly and indirectly," said Klaus Baader, global chief economist at Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking (SGCIB), adding U.S.-China tensions were a second major concern. "Three, the (import) tariffs that are already in effect continue to feed through, slowing real household income growth and weighing on corporate margins," he said. Barclays flagged that, with no obvious catalyst to end the federal government shutdown in the next few weeks, the stoppage may extend well into November, when political and economic pressures should intensify. The Australian dollar rose 0.39% to $0.651 on Monday, cheered by data from top trade partner China showing its economy reasonably resilient to U.S. tariffs. Official data showed China's economy grew 1.1% in the third quarter, topping forecasts, while industrial output also beat with a 6.5% rise. Although the 4.8% annual growth rate marked the weakest pace in a year, it kept China on track to meet its official target of around 5%. (Reporting by Stefano Rebaudo; Editing by Sam Holmes, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Alexander Smith)

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By Jeff Horwitz NEW YORK (Reuters) -Meta researchers found that teens who report that Instagram regularly made them feel bad about their bodies saw significantly more “eating disorder adjacent content” than those who did not, according to an internal document reviewed by Reuters. The posts shown to those users featured “prominent display” of chest, buttocks, or thighs, “explicit judgement” about body types and “content related to disordered eating and/or negative body image.”  While such material is not banned on Instagram, the researchers noted that parents, teens and outside experts have told Meta they believe it is potentially harmful to young users.  Meta surveyed 1,149 teens over the course of the 2023-2024 academic year about whether and how often they felt bad about their bodies after using Instagram. Then they manually sampled the content those users saw on the platform over a three-month period. The study showed that for the 223 teens who often felt bad about their bodies after viewing Instagram, “eating disorder adjacent content” made up 10.5% of what they saw on the platform. Among the other teens in the study, such content accounted for only 3.3% of what they saw.  “Teens who reported frequent body dissatisfaction after viewing posts on Instagram… saw about three times more body-focused/ED-adjacent content than other teens,” the authors wrote, referring to eating disorders, according to a summary of the research reviewed exclusively by Reuters. In addition to seeing more eating disorder-adjacent content, researchers found, the teens who reported the most negative feelings about themselves saw more provocative content more broadly, content Meta classifies as “mature themes,”  “Risky behavior,” “Harm & Cruelty” and “Suffering.” Cumulatively, such content accounted for 27% of what those teens saw on the platform, compared with 13.6% among their peers who hadn’t reported negative feelings.  META RESEARCHERS EXPRESSED CONCERN The researchers stressed that their findings did not prove that Instagram was making users feel worse about their bodies. “It is not possible to establish the causal direction of these findings,” they wrote, noting the possibility that teens who felt bad about themselves could be actively seeking out that material.  The Instagram research, a redacted replica of which is published here and has not been previously reported, demonstrated that Instagram exposed teens who “report frequently experiencing body dissatisfaction" to high doses of content that Meta’s own advisors “have expressed support for limiting,” the writeup said. In a statement, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the document reviewed by Reuters demonstrates Meta’s commitment to understanding and improving its products.  “This research is further proof we remain committed to understanding young people’s experiences and using those insights to build safer, more supportive platforms for teens,” Stone said, noting the company’s recent announcement that it would attempt to show minors content in-line with PG-13 movie standards.   In the study, Meta said that its existing screening tools – which were designed to catch violations of platform rules – were incapable of detecting 98.5% of the “sensitive” content that the company believes might not have been appropriate for teens. The finding was “not necessarily surprising,” the researchers wrote, because Meta had only recently begun work on building an algorithm to detect the potentially harmful content they were examining. 'ASSOCIATION' BETWEEN CONTENT AND 'FEELING WORSE ABOUT ONE'S BODY' The study, which is marked, “Do not distribute internally or externally without permission,” is the latest internal research that demonstrates an “association” between viewing fashion, beauty and fitness content and “reporting feeling worse about one’s body,” the document states. The research was conducted as part of Meta’s efforts to understand interactions between users and its own products, which rely on algorithms to determine which content to show to users.  In the United States, the company has faced state and federal investigations of Instagram’s effects on children as well as civil suits by school districts alleging harmful product design and deceptive marketing of its platforms as safe for teens.  Those suits have prominently cited past leaked internal research from Meta in which researchers expressed their belief that the platform’s content recommendations might be harmful to youth with existing body image issues.  Since July of this year, Stone said, the company has reduced the amount of age-restricted content shown to teenage Instagram users by half.  CONTENT WARRANTED TRIGGER WARNING Jenny Radesky, a University of Michigan Associate Professor of Pediatrics who reviewed Meta’s unreleased research at Reuters’ request, called the study’s methodology robust and its findings disturbing. “This supports the idea that teens with psychological vulnerabilities are being profiled by Instagram and fed more harmful content,” Radesky said. “We know that a lot of what people consume on social media comes from the feed, not from search.” Past internal research at Meta “has demonstrated an association between frequency of reporting feeling worse about one’s body” and consuming Instagram fitness and beauty content, the writeup says.  Meta’s researchers wrote that teens, parents, pediatricians, external advisors and Meta’s own Eating Disorder & Body Image Advisory Council have urged Instagram to limit how much of that content it shows to teenagers, warning that it “may be detrimental to teen well-being, specifically by precipitating or exacerbating feelings of body dissatisfaction.” Such content falls afoul of Meta’s rules against content that overtly promotes eating disorders. The report included samples of problematic content including images of skinny women in lingerie and bikinis, fight videos and a drawing of a crying figure scrawled with phrases including “how could I ever compare” and “make it all end.” One of the example posts showed a closeup of a woman’s lacerated neck.  Though the content did not violate Meta’s rules, the researchers found it disturbing enough that they issued a “sensitive content” warning to colleagues reading their work. (Reporting by Jeff Horwitz in Oakland, Calif. Editing by Kenneth Li and Michael Learmonth)

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