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Major Outage Hits Websites, Apps, Online Games Around the World; Louvre Remains Closed After Brazen Jewel Heist; Two Dead After Cargo Plane Slides Off Runway in Hong Kong. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired October 20, 2025 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking news, major internet outages around the world this morning. You probably know if you tried to log into any website, app, banking site, even online gambling. We will tell you everything we are learning this morning.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: And how did they pull it off, and where are they now? A brazen jewel heist at the Louvre in broad daylight, priceless treasures stolen from the world's most visited museum. The latest on the investigation there this morning.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: And two people were killed, just look at this, overnight after a plane skids off the runway and into the sea. I'm Kate Bolduan with Sara Sidner and John Berman. This is CNN News Central.

So, the breaking news this morning that many, many Americans are waking up to, massive internet out outage impacting major websites, major apps, gaming platforms, including Amazon, AT&T, just look at this list, Delta Airlines, Disney+, Facebook, Hulu, Snapchat, United Airlines, Venmo, more than even what you're talking than I'm even mentioning there.

At the center of this is Amazon Web Services, that major provider of cloud services for all sorts of companies. AWS says, now it has identified the root cause and also saying this, that we continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS services. We continue to work towards full resolution and we'll provide updates as we have more information to share. Said another way, we're not saying a lot right now.

Let's get over to CNN's Brynn Gingras. I started noticing this morning on multiple levels as it was unfolding. What's happening?

BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and that's basically it, right? So, they connect the business to us, the consumer, through apps on your phone. So, if you're waking up, you're tapping on an app, you're like, how come it's not working?

BOLDUAN: Exactly.

GINGRAS: This is likely the problem. BOLDUAN: You mean like the ring of death.

GINGRAS: Yes, the ring of death. They're actually saying, please submit to issue technical issues. Keep doing that even though we're not answering them right now or we are trying to get to them. There's basically a huge backlog.

As you just said, there's been some significant progress in this happened way overnight. So there has been some, you know, significant progress, but still there's a huge backlog of all these apps and all these companies that are looking to basically get restored. So, there's even issues at the airport. I'm hearing about people who are trying to check into their flights and they can't because they can't do it through the phone.

So, there's so many different companies, as you've just listed, a whole bunch of them, Amazon, AT&T, Delta, gaming services, right, like Roblox you know, even cryptocurrency companies are being affected. Coinbase essentially saying, don't worry, your money is safe. So, there are companies now having to also just kind of respond to consumers at this point.

But like you just said, what Amazon Web Services is saying is that they are seeing significant signs of recovery and they're continuing to work towards that full resolution, and they're going to continue to provide information as we have been seeing overnight continuous updates. But like I said, there's still a huge backlog here. So, if you wake up and you can't figure out why something is not working, this is likely the culprit, but we're going to continue to --

BOLDUAN: I mean, I started noticing it on various apps around like 3:3-ish this morning.

GINGRAS: Why are you up at 3:00?

BOLDUAN: Yes, this is what time we wake up around here. But it's really -- it really did start cascading, like I even tried to get on the Wall Street Journal website, couldn't get on there for a period of time.

GINGRAS: Yes. I mean, hopefully AWS makes up 30 percent of this global market space. So, I mean, it is huge. Like I actually was doing a lot of research and I can't believe how big this is and it just really points to the, how fragile this infrastructure is should something happen like this.

BOLDUAN: I mean, understandably sparking fears of like vulnerabilities, of course, but let's see what happens throughout the morning. Brynn's on top of this for us. Thank you so much.

GINGRAS: Yes.

BOLDUAN: J.B.?

BERMAN: All right. With us now, Lance Ulanoff, editor at large for TechRadar. Lance, great to see you. Kate says she noticed when she was reading The Wall Street Journal, I was reading FanDuel. I was on FanDuel this morning, and that wasn't working. But everything, from the Journal to FanDuel, to, you know, our big beautiful walls here, tech going crazy just about everywhere, including in our studios. Can you explain how it is that this one thing can affect so many different things?

LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR AT LARGE, TECHRADAR: Well, first of all, the most important site that's down is Starbucks. That's number one. Number two, you know, AWS sits in the middle of everything. You know, it is -- you know, all of these companies, you know, it's like why build the house, right? You're just going to live in it. And that's really how these companies work. They all have offloaded their web services, their cloud-based services to AWS, which is great because it's more affordable. It's also more, more scalable than they could do on their own. So, that sounds great, except when it fails, and it seems -- it feels like sometimes a single point of failure because everything goes down at once.

[07:05:06]

And it's not just the services that you're accessing. Your smart home stops working. Your Ring, which is actually owned by Amazon, is one of the impacted services, so your smart thermostat, your smart video door, they just don't work without the internet. They're not designed that way. That's the thing. We've designed everything to work with this constant connectivity. And when you pull that big plug, everything basically becomes dumb.

BERMAN: when something does go wrong, you know, in terms that non- tech people can understand, what is it? I mean, I don't think it's someone pulling a plug at a data center. What is the glitch that causes all of this?

ULANOFF: I mean, usually, it's like a translation service almost. It's like, okay, hi, you are trying to reach me. Who are you? And there's in between, there's something that says, here's who I am, and they do a handshake and everything's okay. Well, that's the part of the service that basically broke, you know, where they couldn't identify each other. That one interconnection couldn't work, you know?

And this happened apparently in an East Coast area, an East Coast service center. They may have been in Virginia. But that one failure has had a global impact. I've been talking to people in the U.K. all morning and they've been dealing with this because they're up earlier, longer than us.

BERMAN: My son in Taiwan can't get on Snapchat this morning. I mean, this truly is a global phenomenon. So, what vulnerabilities then does this reveal? We don't know what caused this. We have no reason to believe it was a bad actor, but how attractive is this to a bad actor when they see this?

ULANOFF: Right. Well, this is the problem I do, I continue to be confused about why there is not instant redundancy when you can have something that's seemingly so small or so localized have such a cascading and global impact. And we had CrowdStrike last year where all of these systems running windows and they all failed, and banks and airports failed. And it was like, well, why is it like that? And we don't seem to have a good answer for this yet. And I think part of the problem is the more consolidation we have and the fewer sort of competing web services we have, the more of a problem this is going to be.

And, yes, it's not a good look. You certainly don't want someone to look at this and say a bad actor and say, hey, if I just make this one thing go down, I could create a cascading effect and all things can go down and this could impact infrastructure, and that is a scary thought.

BERMAN: It is and we are learning more and more about this throughout the morning as more sites do appear to be coming back online. Not all yet though. We're watching it very carefully.

Lance, I hope you get your Starbucks soon. Thank you so much for being with us. Sara?

SIDNER: And we hope your son is able to finally access Snapchat because that is big, huge.

BERMAN: It is. Well, actually, it's how they communicate with each other, just instant messages.

SIDNER: It's true.

All right, this morning it took about seven minutes and the priceless jewels were gone from the Louvre Museum. How did thieves do it? New details on how police say they managed to pull this off.

Also, the NTSB is investigating a cracked windscreen on a 737 passenger plane. The plane landing safely, but how did it happen? Did something strike the window or did something else go wrong?

And caught on camera, dramatic moments as deputies rescue a woman from a burning car.

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[07:10:00]

SIDNER: Giving you a live picture right now of the Louvre. It is closed this morning after a brazen jewelry heist there. Police say the thieves took just seven minutes to swipe nine pieces of priceless jewelry, but only got away with eight of them because they did not manage to swipe the royal crown. The piece of stolen include necklaces, earrings, and a tiara worn by French royals in the 19th century. Investigators say the robbers used a truck with a mechanical ladder to break through a window, and then they got away on motorcycle.

CNN's Melissa Bell is outside the Louvre this morning. This is an incredible story and it took just seven minutes in broad daylight. How did this all go down? MELISSA BELL, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's right, broad daylight, Sara. The museum was open there were crowds all around it, much as there are this morning. This was yesterday morning, Sunday morning, more than 24 hours ago. The museum had been open for about half an hour when people who were inside and we spoke to several eye witnesses yesterday, say they heard loud bangs.

Now what we understand that was the robbers coming in through that window. You mentioned they used this truck with a mechanical lift. And they used this angle driver to smash through that first floor window. So, there's this sort of disconnect between the means by which they got in and how precious the jewelry they managed to get their hands on was.

So, quite basic when you look at the rudimentary tools they used and what they got their hands on some of France's most precious crown jewels, as you mentioned a moment ago, priceless in value of priceless inestimable, say French authorities, cultural and heritage value.

Still this morning, they remain at large, four men that authorities are looking for. The manhunt continues for the men for the jewels. Only one of those pieces, as you mentioned, that was left behind, that is the crown of Princess -- Empress Eugenie, rather, who was the wife of Napoleon III. But the other pieces of Judy, really quite extraordinary pieces, brooches, earrings, necklaces, all worn by the queens of France in the 19th century.

[07:15:00]

A couple of theories out there, say French authorities, either this was done on commission. Someone's looking to get their hands on these specific pieces of jewelry for, say, a private collection, or in far more worrying, Sara, as if they were looking to get their hands on these pieces of jewelry to dismantle them, sell the actual emeralds, diamonds, rubies that were involved and melt down the gold. For now, no indication on which those -- which it was of those two scenarios. Sara?

SIDNER: Yes. And ahead, we're going to be speaking to a former jewel thief who's going to explain a little bit about how these things can work. But it is an incredible story there, Melissa Bell, that happened there at the Louvre. I really appreciate you reporting this morning. John?

BERMAN: All right, terrifying images of a cargo plane skids off the runway into the water, look at that, killing two people. What we were learning this morning about how this happened.

And President Trump in a crown dumping waste on protesters. Does this show the president mocking the huge demonstrations or maybe concerned about them?

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[07:20:00] BOLDUAN: Breaking overnight, a cargo plane skidded off the runway and into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport. As it slid, this aircraft actually hit an airport security patrol car pushing it into the water, and in doing so, killing the two airport workers inside the vehicle. The plane also broken too as it came off the runway. Officials say it all happened as the Boeing aircraft veered off course after arriving from Dubai. You can see, just take a look at this video, the aircraft was left partially submerged with his tail section, completely snapped off the. Front section of the plane below the cockpit also suffered significant damage. As I mentioned, two airport workers were killed. The four-crew members on board the cargo plane were hospitalized.

Joining me right now, CNN Transportation Analyst Mary Schiavo, she's a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, of course, and there is very clearly an investigation that is ramping up and just getting underway when it comes to this one, Mary. What are your first questions?

MARY SCHIAVO, CNN TRANSPORTATION ANALYST: Well, my first question, when I first heard about it, I thought it was a runway overrun, meaning that the plane went off the end of the runway. And if we have seen many, many of those in the U.S. and elsewhere over the years, and my thought went to what's called the arrester beds, which are kind of like empty boxes of cement, if you could think of that, at the end of the runway and the plane, if it goes off the end of the runway, it settles into that and stops the plane. But here the plane went off the side of the runway.

And at a very interesting point in the landing touchdown, it came in at about 143 knots or 134 knots. And when it got to 43 knots, that's when this veer off the runway happened. And that would be about time the nose gear comes down. You might be applying manual braking. You might have problems with the rudder. So, that's a very important point in the landing sequence. So, it does look like a mechanical failure right at that point where the nose gear would be settling down onto the runway or you'd be applying braking.

So, it does look like a mechanical kind of halfway down the runway, and the arrester beds at the ends wouldn't have helped this one.

BOLDUAN: I mean, and there is a lot of questions still. You get authorities at Hong Kong say that there are no calls or signs of distress coming from the aircraft on approach, which, you know, that could indicate that it really did all happen as they landed, so much to learn from this one.

While I have you, there's also another wild story from last week that we're just learning about this, a United flight that it had to be -- it was going from Denver to L.A., diverted to Salt Lake City last week after the pilots discovered a crack in the windshield. There are actually photos circulating online, reportedly showing the pilot's arm bleeding and bruised after the fact, and showing not just some of the photos that are circulating, not just a crack, but like there's a lot of splintering that seems to appear on that windshield. The flight landed safely, just so everyone knows. The 130-plus passengers were put on another flight to continue to L.A., but how dangerous was this?

SCHIAVO: Well, it was very dangerous. And I guess the good news and the bad news is a windshield, a windscreen on an aircraft, is many layers thick. And we can see that something up in the upper, as you're looking out the plane, the upper left hand corner caused it to look like there was an impact at that point. And the fact that the glass shattered on one of the inside layers and harmed the pilot, you know, I'm sorry for the pilot, but the windshield held.

And as far as I can tell from the research out there that's available, there was no depressurization that what's been -- would've been called an explosive depressurization. It could have been much more catastrophic. So, the, you know, cool thinking of the pilots and, of course, the strength of the windshield holding despite one of the layers shattered, you know, is the good news and the bad news.

But going back, I always go back to other accidents I've worked on and, you know, there are a couple possibilities. One is a high altitude hail. They can get very large because the hail is blown back up, especially over the Rockies. The hail gets blown back up and all the times it gets blown back up into the atmosphere, it grows as it gets additional water droplets put on it.

And then planes and a variety of planes have had a problem with the windshield heaters. There are wiring terminal blocks all around that windshield. That windshield has to be heated because, obviously, every flight is at very -- most flights have high altitude. And these have had problems in the past with arcing, sparking fires, and those have caused windshields to crack, and in some cases actually fires around the windshield, which might explain the scorching and burning on this plane.

[07:25:05]

But that's just based on prior accidents I've worked.

So, at this point, I'd say no to bird strike. Lots of people are saying space junk. The FAAs says that's a one in a trillion chance, but they didn't tell us how they got those statistics, or hail and a combination of some kind of a problem with the windshield heater is my best guess.

BOLDUAN: Wow. Mary, your expertise, you're just like an encyclopedia of knowledge of what we need to know when these things happen. Unfortunately, this one, they all got where they needed to be, but definitely looked like a scary situation.

SCHIAVO: Right.

BOLDUAN: It's good to see you, Mary. Thank you so much. Sara?

SCHIAVO: Yes. SIDNER: All right, thank you, Kate. Ahead, how city health officials from across America are banding together over vaccines. Their message to the public.

And job market jitters, what new data on how Americans feel about their job prospect says.

Those stories and more ahead.

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