Amazon reports progress in fixing Web shutdown

Amazon.com Inc. said Friday afternoon that the technical problems plaguing its Web services business still hadn’t been completely resolved, but the company expected the issues to be fixed later Friday.

Amazon, which rents Web services and storage to companies, said it has made progress in fixing the outage, which has lingered for more than 24 hours and prompted some websites to move to contingency plans as they wait for a full recovery.

“We continue to see progress in recovering volumes, and have heard many additional customers confirm that they’re recovering,” Amazon said in an update on its website at 11:49 a.m.

It is unclear how many companies have been hurt by the shutdown.

Reddit, a user-generated news site, said Friday evening that it is getting capacity back and has “enough servers to handle the weekend traffic (we think).”

“We hope to be at full capacity by Monday,” Reddit said on its website.

Startups such as Foursquare and Quora, which both cited service problems Thursday related to Amazon’s outage, appeared to be operating regularly Friday afternoon.

Bankrupt Borders gets OK for $6.6 million in bonuses

A lawyer for bookseller Borders Group Inc. said a judge has approved paying executives up to $6.6 million in bonuses as the company works to reorganize under bankruptcy court protection.

The Office of the U.S. Trustee objected to an earlier request to pay about $8 million in bonuses.

Lawyer Andrew Glenn confirmed that a judge in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York approved the lower amount Friday.

Borders says the bonuses are necessary to retain executives in key posts. Forty-seven executives have left the company since Borders filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection in February.

Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders wants to emerge from bankruptcy protection by August or September.

Samsung suing Apple in latest patent dispute

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. said it is suing Apple Inc. for patent rights violations, only days after Apple sued Samsung for the same reason.

Samsung is accusing Apple of violating its rights to 10 smartphone and computer patents. The company filed lawsuits Thursday in Seoul, Tokyo and Mannheim, Germany.

The lawsuits come only days after Apple sued Samsung in a California court. Apple alleges Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones and tablet computers copy Apple’s popular iPad and iPhone.

The lawsuits are the latest in a long string of patent disputes among phone makers. In recent years Apple, Microsoft Corp., Nokia Corp., HTC Corp. and others have taken legal action to protect their intellectual property rights.

Treasury program to buy toxic assets showing gain

The Treasury Department said Friday that an investment program set up during the financial crisis to buy toxic assets from banks is showing a $1.7 billion gain.

The department committed $22.1 billion in taxpayer funds to the Public-Private Investment Program, which was created in March 2009.

The money has been used to set up funds that have invested in mortgage-backed securities and other financial assets. The goal is to take those assets off the books of large banks that were facing huge losses from bad real estate investments during the housing bubble.

The department has earned more than $500 million in dividends and other profits from the investments, Treasury said. And Treasury’s share of the securities held in the funds has increased in value by $1.2 billion.