Issue #91

Amazon breaks the internet, woman uses ChatGPT to win court case, Bank of England sounds the alarm, and more.

News from 16 October - 23 October 2025

Amazon Breaks the Internet

Apps and platforms relying on Amazon Web Services went dark on Monday after an hours-long outage disrupted a massive chunk of the world's internet.

Around 1,000 companies were affected, from messaging apps like Snapchat and Signal to video games like Roblox and Fortnite, as well as financial platforms like Venmo and Robinhood. Even Amazon's own Ring doorbells and Alexa assistants stopped working. Over one million complaints were logged in the US, with more than 800,000 from the UK.

The outage stemmed from Amazon's US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia, home to over 50 data centre campuses. Most services returned by Monday morning, but the event underscored a major bottleneck: global cloud infrastructure is overwhelmingly controlled by just two companies, AWS and Microsoft's Azure. One poster on social media: "Really shows how easy it would be for Bezos and Ellison to just turn off the internet if they wanted to, for any reason."

Source

‍AI Podcasts Hallucinate

A single podcast network called Quiet Please has released over 10 million downloads since September 2023, producing nearly 100 separate series using AI-generated hosts who cost just $1 per episode to create.

The company behind it, Inception Point AI, aims to churn out 5,000 podcasts with more than 3,000 episodes per week. The shows cover everything from AI startups to celebrity biographies, many with one-word titles like "Anime," "Bunkers," and "Tsunami." One podcast called "Lawn" features an AI host named Nigel Thistledown talking about grass.

In one hallucination, Thistledown describes garden technology as "like having a particularly observant but-lutter," before an elderly lady's voice interrupts to say, "I would never have found my poem!" The woman is never heard from again. “But-lutter” is not explained. Tech writer Chris Bennion: "They have attempted to give their presenters personalities, but that seems to mainly boil down to a string of hoary old metaphors and clichés."

Source

‍Bank of England Sounds the Alarm

The governor of the Bank of England warned that the collapse of two US companies could signal wider problems in the financial system, drawing parallels with the 2008 financial crisis.

Andrew Bailey told a House of Lords committee that it was important to take the bankruptcies of car parts supplier First Brands and subprime car lender Tricolor "very seriously." Both failures have raised questions about the quality of deals in the private credit market, where companies arrange loans from non-bank lenders.

Bailey said he didn't want "to sound too foreboding," but questioned whether these were isolated cases or "the canary in the coalmine" for the private finance sector. He noted that private credit lenders were starting to engage in "slicing and dicing and tranching of loan structures" reminiscent of pre-2008 practices. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon: "My antenna goes up when things like that happen. When you see one cockroach, there are probably more."

Source

Bulletin Board

• Walmart Pauses H-1B Visa Hiring. Walmart will pause hiring candidates requiring H-1B visas in response to Trump's new $100,000 fee for skilled foreign workers. The retail giant is the largest H-1B beneficiary in retail with over 2,000 visas approved in early 2025, though tech companies dominate overall. Amazon secured 10,000 visas while Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google each got over 4,000. The US Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit claiming the fee makes the programme "cost-prohibitive." Source
• Wikipedia Traffic Drops 8% Due to AI. Human page views on Wikipedia fell 8% year-over-year as search engines increasingly use AI to provide direct answers rather than linking to sources. The Wikimedia Foundation's Marshall Miller warned that fewer site visits could mean fewer volunteer editors and individual donors. Google has disputed claims that AI summaries reduce traffic, but Miller argues companies using Wikipedia content "must encourage more visitors" to the site itself. Younger generations are also seeking information on social video platforms instead of the open web. Source
• Woman Uses ChatGPT to Win Court Case. A California woman successfully overturned her eviction notice using ChatGPT and an AI search platform, Perplexity, to represent herself in court, avoiding tens of thousands in penalties. Lynn White initially lost a jury trial but used the chatbot to identify procedural errors and draft court responses. This comes after a California attorney received a $10,000 fine for submitting an AI-generated appeal citing 21 fabricated cases. Lynn White: “I would tell ChatGPT to pretend it was a Harvard Law professor and to rip my arguments apart.” Source
• US and Australia Sign $8.5bn Critical Minerals Deal. The US and Australia agreed to boost supplies of rare earths and critical minerals to counter China's market dominance. The deal supports $8.5bn in mining and processing projects, including $1bn to be invested over six months. China currently controls 70% of rare earth mining and 90% of processing. Australian rare earths companies surged after the announcement, with Perth-based Arafura Rare Earths jumping 7.7%. Source
• ChatGPT Downloads Drop 8% This Month. OpenAI's ChatGPT mobile app downloads fell over 8% month-over-month in October, while US users are spending 22.5% less time with the app since July. App intelligence firm Apptopia found that both average time spent and session numbers are declining, suggesting it's not simply more efficient prompting. Paying subscribers represent 70% of OpenAI's annual recurring revenue, making retention critical as competition from Google's Gemini intensifies. Source

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