UAE-based real estate developer Arada has acquired a 75% stake in UK residential developer Regal in a deal valued at AED2.5 billion ($681 million), marking its entry into the London market. The acquisition represents Arada's second international expansion following its move into Australia in 2024 and provides the company with an immediate platform to operate in one of the world's leading property markets. Regal will be rebranded as Arada London as part of the transaction.

The deal accelerates the delivery of Regal's existing 10,000-unit residential pipeline across 11 projects in London. Arada plans to more than triple this pipeline over the next three years, leveraging Regal's 30-year track record and 150-person team. The UK developer has previously delivered more than 4,000 homes and 1 million square feet of commercial space, with current projects including Fulton & Fifth in Wembley, which comprises 876 homes with 40% designated as affordable housing.

Arada's expansion into London aligns with its strategy of geographic diversification beyond its strong UAE base. Since its founding in 2017, the developer has launched 10 projects in the UAE, including the Aljada megaproject and Armani Beach Residences at Palm Jumeirah. The company's portfolio across the UAE and Australia amounts to over AED95 billion with more than 42,000 units, of which 10,000 have been delivered to date.

The acquisition comes as Gulf investors continue to deploy capital internationally amid strong property markets in their home regions. Arada is owned by Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi, deputy ruler of Sharjah, and Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia. The investment also coincides with the UK government's push to increase housing supply, though rising construction costs present challenges to delivery targets.

A major outage at Amazon Web Services has disrupted operations for numerous popular applications and platforms globally, affecting millions of users. The cloud computing infrastructure failure began early Monday morning, with users reporting widespread issues accessing services including Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, and various gaming platforms. Amazon confirmed it was investigating increased error rates and latency across multiple AWS services, though the company has not yet identified the root cause of the system failure.

The disruption appears to have originated with servers hosted in the US-EAST-1 region, according to initial reports. This triggered a cascade effect that impacted AWS infrastructure supporting millions of websites and applications worldwide. Downdetector, a platform that monitors service outages, reported receiving over four million problem reports in a single morning—more than double the typical weekly volume—indicating the scale of the disruption across affected services.

Among the services experiencing significant operational problems are communication platforms like Zoom, Signal, and Slack; gaming services including Roblox, Fortnite, and PlayStation Network; social media applications such as Snapchat; and financial services from banks including Lloyds and Bank of Scotland. Streaming platforms Prime Video and Crunchyroll, along with educational tool Duolingo and design platform Canva, have also been affected by the cloud service failure.

The outage has manifested differently across regions, with Amazon's own websites remaining operational in Europe while still experiencing service-specific errors. AWS engineers are actively working to mitigate the issues and restore normal operations. The company has committed to providing regular updates as they work to resolve the widespread service disruption that has highlighted the internet's heavy reliance on cloud infrastructure providers.