A 34-year-old mother of five died after being bitten by one of her dogs during a dispute over chicken nuggets, an inquest has heard. Michelle Hempstead of Southend-on-Sea was feeding her two dogs - a Pomeranian named Pom and a mastiff-rottweiler cross named Trigg - at her Essex flat on July 29, 2024, when the incident occurred. The larger dog, Trigg, bit Ms. Hempstead around her left armpit and upper arm while snapping at the smaller dog during the food dispute.

The bite severed an artery and vein, leading to traumatic blood loss that ultimately caused multiple organ failure. Ms. Hempstead was rushed to hospital following the incident but tragically passed away the next day at the Royal London Hospital. Bystanders had initially rushed to provide first aid after hearing her screams during the incident at her flat.

At the Essex Coroner's Court hearing in Chelmsford, Ms. Hempstead's partner Samuel West described the incident as an "absolute freak accident." He told the court that Ms. Hempstead had bought McDonald's food and "had a box of, I think, 20 nuggets" that she liked to throw in the air for the dogs. Mr. West explained that as Pom went to get a nugget, "Trigg's done this thing where he chomps his mouth" and accidentally caught Ms. Hempstead under the arm.

Senior coroner Lincoln Brookes noted the additional tragedy that Ms. Hempstead and her family had suffered another bereavement just weeks before when her daughter passed away. The coroner accepted evidence that both dogs were "quite well behaved" and described Trigg as "an otherwise gentle giant." Mr. West emphasized that Trigg "didn't have a bad bone in his body" and never showed aggression prior to the incident.

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.