The Scottish National Party has appointed former MP and council leader Callum McCaig as its new chief executive, marking the third leadership change in the role within three years. McCaig takes over immediately from Carol Beattie, who stepped down due to personal health reasons following a meeting of the party's National Executive Committee on Sunday. The swift transition comes as the SNP prepares for the 2026 Holyrood election campaign.

McCaig brings significant political experience to the position, having served as leader of Aberdeen City Council, MP for Aberdeen South, and special adviser to two SNP first ministers. His background includes work in the private sector specializing in public affairs and campaigns. In his appointment statement, McCaig described the role as a "great privilege" and paid tribute to his predecessor's work while emphasizing the party's readiness for upcoming electoral challenges.

Beattie had been appointed permanently as chief executive in March, after serving in an interim capacity since October 2024 following the resignation of former Daily Record editor Murray Foote. During her tenure, she oversaw what she described as a transformation of party headquarters ahead of the 2026 election. Beattie expressed gratitude to her colleagues and reaffirmed her commitment to continuing her involvement in the independence campaign despite stepping down from the executive role.

The position has seen considerable turnover since Peter Murrell's departure in March 2023 after nearly 25 years as chief executive. SNP business convener Angela Constance welcomed McCaig's appointment, highlighting his public and private sector experience and expressing confidence in his ability to steer the organization toward electoral success. Both outgoing and incoming executives emphasized their focus on securing victory in 2026 and advancing Scotland's journey toward independence.

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.