Evening digest: AWS outage, Apple near $4 trillion mark, China’s slow growth

It’s been a volatile start to the week.

A tense Trump-Zelenskyy meeting has shifted the tone on Ukraine peace talks, Amazon’s AWS outage broke parts of the internet, Apple is edging toward a record $4T valuation on iPhone strength, and China’s economy just posted its slowest growth in a year amid renewed trade tensions.

Here’s what happened on Monday.

Trump asks Zelenskyy to consider Russia’s terms

After a tense sit-down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday, US President Donald Trump appeared to soften his tone toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

According to people familiar with the meeting, Trump pressed Zelenskyy to consider Russia’s terms for ending the war, including giving up the Donbas region and warned that rejecting the proposal could mean Ukraine faces even worse consequences.

Zelenskyy left Washington without getting any firm commitments from Trump. The US President reportedly stressed that fighting should stop along the current front lines, essentially freezing the conflict where it is.

The exchange was said to have turned heated, even erupting into shouting at one point, underscoring how strained the talks were.

Meanwhile, US and Russian officials are still in contact ahead of a Trump-Putin summit planned in Hungary, another sign that major diplomatic moves may be coming.

AWS outage broke internet

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s massive cloud arm went down today, taking a bunch of websites and online services with it around the world.

The outage started late in the morning and lasted for hours, disrupting companies that depend on AWS to run their apps and services.

Amazon confirmed the issue and said it stemmed from some kind of technical failure in their cloud systems.

The fallout was huge: e-commerce platforms, financial services, streaming sites, all reported downtime, affecting millions of users.

Amazon says it’s doing a full investigation to figure out what went wrong while engineers work to get everything fully back online.

The incident is a reminder of just how much of the internet runs on a few big cloud providers and what can happen when one of them has a bad day.

Apple near $4 trillion market cap

Apple is inching toward a massive $4 trillion market cap, thanks largely to the hype around the new iPhone 17.

In its first 10 days on sale, the iPhone 17 has already outpaced the iPhone 16 by about 14% in major markets like the US and China.

Analysts say the jump makes sense; the new model comes with a faster chip, a better display, more base storage, and a much-improved front camera, all without raising the starting price from last year’s model.

Investors are clearly impressed. Apple’s stock climbed almost 3% on Monday, hitting all-time highs.

Several investment firms have since bumped up their price targets, saying they expect Apple to keep climbing as this iPhone upgrade cycle plays out and demand stays strong.

China’s growth slows

China’s economy lost some steam in the third quarter of 2025, growing 4.8%, the slowest pace in about a year.

The slowdown comes as the country continues to deal with a struggling property sector and rising trade tensions with the US.

Just a quarter earlier, growth was stronger at 5.2%, so the pullback is noticeable.

The latest flare-up in US–China tensions didn’t help: Beijing recently restricted exports of rare earth minerals, which broke an uneasy trade truce and prompted President Trump to threaten 100% tariffs on Chinese goods starting in November.

Those tensions are already showing up in the numbers. Chinese exports to the US plunged 27% in September.

But overall exports actually grew because Chinese firms have been redirecting sales to other parts of the world.

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