The Palestinian flag was raised outside what is now Palestine's embassy in central London, marking Britain's formal recognition of a Palestinian state. The ceremony followed Prime Minister Keir Starmer's landmark announcement of the UK's decision to recognize Palestinian statehood, with Canada and Australia taking similar coordinated steps.

Palestine's Ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, addressed a crowd gathered outside the building that previously served as the Palestine Mission to the UK. "We are gathered today in front of the Palestinian Mission to the UK here in London to mark a historic moment," said Zomlot, noting that the recognition comes "in the same capital of the Balfour Declaration, after more than a century of ongoing denial, dispossession and erasure."

The ambassador held up a plaque reading 'The Embassy of the State of Palestine' that will soon be mounted on the building pending legal and bureaucratic work. Zomlot described the moment as "not only about Palestine, it is also about Britain and the British government's solemn responsibility" and "an acknowledgement of a historic injustice." The small team at the mission erupted in cheers upon hearing the announcement.

Zomlot, who was born in a refugee camp in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, reflected on the significance of the moment, calling it "a South Africa moment for Palestine" in reference to the end of South Africa's apartheid government. He stated that recognition represents "an act of assurances to the Palestinian people that they hope for a better future and ... peace is possible," emphasizing that "Palestine exists, it has always existed and it always will."

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.