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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -NASA's top official on Monday said the U.S. space agency was opening up the contract for its Artemis 3 moon mission to compete against SpaceX, which he said was running behind schedule.  "I'm in the process of opening that contract up. I think we'll see companies like Blue get involved, and maybe others," NASA administrator Sean Duffy, who also serves as U.S. Transportation secretary, told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. Blue Origin is a SpaceX rival founded by Jeff Bezos. "We're going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually get us back to the moon first." NASA's multibillion dollar Artemis series of missions are aimed at returning humans to the moon as China plans a 2030 astronaut moon landing. Artemis 3 has been planned for 2027 with SpaceX's Starship. But Duffy said billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX was not on schedule and could put the United States behind its rival, with U.S. President Trump wanting to see the mission take place before his White House term ends in January 2029. "They're behind schedule, and so the president wants to make sure we beat the Chinese," Duffy told Fox.  Artemis 2, a 10-day flight around the moon and back involving systems built by built by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, is on track for April and could get moved up to February, he added.  Bezos and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp reportedly spoke with Trump over the summer when the Republican president was feuding with Musk, who backed Trump in the 2024 election and went on to lead the broad effort to cut the federal government known as DOGE. Representatives for SpaceX and Blue Origin could not be immediately reached for comment. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; additional reporting by Deborah Sophia and Jaspreet Singh; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

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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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By Svea Herbst-Bayliss NEW YORK (Reuters) -Activist investor Impactive Capital has selected a handful of director candidates with experience in banking and payments to serve on financial technology company WEX's board, signaling its intent to push ahead with a planned proxy fight. Impactive, which owns 6.4% of WEX, signed up four industry executives to serve on its slate, two people familiar with the matter said. Impactive co-founder Lauren Taylor Wolfe may also stand as a director candidate, taking the number of total candidates to five, said the sources, who are not permitted to discuss the private agreements publicly. The selection of directors – long before the window to nominate candidates opens next year – underscores ongoing tension between the two sides. Impactive said in May, just two days after WEX's annual meeting, that it intends to run a proxy fight. WEX is valued at roughly $5 billion and its shares have fallen 13% since January. “We have a history of constructive engagement with Impactive and we welcome feedback from all our shareholders,” a WEX representative said. This would be only the second time in Impactive's eight-year history that the firm has nominated directors to a board. It settled its fight with financial technology company Envestnet in 2023 when the company added three directors to the board, including Taylor Wolfe. For WEX, Impactive selected Ellen Alemany, vice chair of First Citizens Bank, Ken Cornick, co-founder of airport security company CLEAR, Jim Fox, former interim CEO and current board chair of Envestnet and fintech investor Kush Saxena who is a former CEO of Getnet and was a former chief strategy officer of Mastercard. Taylor Wolfe is scheduled to speak at Tuesday's 13D Monitor Active-Passive Investment Summit in New York where investors will present their best investment ideas and present updates to existing activist campaigns. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Nia Williams)

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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 nine hours of disruptions, some applications were gradually coming back online as of 1:00 p.m. ET (1700 GMT). But AWS acknowledged that elevated errors were still affecting several AWS services and that it was working on recovering connectivity. AWS was down for more than 9,300 users as of 1:00 p.m. ET, according to outage tracking website Downdetector. That figure is higher than the earlier peak of about 5,800 reports at 3:48 a.m. ET. Lambda, one of AWS's computing services, was experiencing errors due to issues with an internal subsystem, AWS said in an update on its status page. "We are taking steps to recover this internal Lambda system," it said. AWS said earlier the root cause of the outage is an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers to ensure improved performance and capacity. The issue, AWS said, originated from within the "EC2 internal network." EC2 refers to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" service, which provides on-demand cloud capacity within AWS. Businesses use EC2 to run virtual servers that they need to develop, launch and host applications, and can scale up or down on capacity as required. Steps to resolve EC2 system-related issues resulted in some early signs of recovery across a few data centers, AWS said in an update on its status page. It is taking similar measures at the remaining locations and expects the problems to subside, AWS added, without providing a specific timeline. While some apps like Reddit and Roblox had largely stabilized, according to outage tracking website Downdetector, others, including Snapchat, PayPal's Venmo and Duolingo, were showing a resurgence in issues seen earlier in the day. ISSUE ORIGINATED FROM AWS SITE KNOWN FOR PREVIOUS OUTAGES AWS provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies, governments and individuals and is the world's largest cloud provider, followed by Microsoft's Azure and Alphabet's Google Cloud. Disruptions to its servers can cause outages across websites and platforms – ranging from food delivery apps to gaming platforms and airline systems – that rely on its cloud infrastructure. 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 outages in 2021 and 2020. According to documentation on the AWS website, the US-EAST-1 site is often the default region for many AWS services.  Asked for comment, AWS directed Reuters to its status page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. "FRAGILE INFRASTRUCTURES" The problem highlights how interconnected everyday digital services have become and their reliance on a small number of global cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life, experts and academics said. "This outage once again highlights the dependency we have on relatively fragile infrastructures," said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at European cybersecurity firm ESET. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland and telecom service providers Vodafone and BT were all hit, according to Downdetector's UK website, as was UK tax, payments and customs authority HMRC's website. "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. Ookla, which owns Downdetector, said over 4 million users reported issues due to the incident. "For major businesses, hours of cloud downtime translate to millions in lost productivity and revenue," said Ryan Griffin, U.S. cyber practice leader at insurance broker McGill and Partners.  FROM SNAPCHAT TO VENMO: OUTAGE TAKES DOWN APPS Ookla said at least a thousand companies were affected by the outage. Snapchat last had over 7,500 reports on Downdetector, lower than the peak of more than 22,000 but still higher than the 4,000 outage instances at around 7:00 a.m. ET. Artificial intelligence 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; 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 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. While there has been no indication 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, Jaspreet Singh and Arsheeya Bajwa; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Joe Bavier and Richard Chang)

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