AW Dev Rethought Radar | Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2025

Your 5-minute tech digest — AI access expands, cloud giants face turbulence, and Apple wraps a “Scary Fast” month in style.

🔭 The Rethought Radar

• AWS Shares Post-Mortem on the Oct 20 Outage (Oct 30)

  Amazon released its detailed post-incident summary for the massive Oct 20 outage that disrupted services like Slack, Duolingo, and Snapchat.

  The report attributes the failure to a propagation issue in DynamoDB’s DNS automation within the US-EAST-1 region, which cascaded into network routing instability.

  AWS confirmed it has disabled the automation layer responsible and is adding new regional guardrails before the holiday-season load spike.

• Google Expands Gemini API Access to Developers (Oct 28)

  Google officially opened Gemini 1.5 API access to all developers through Vertex AI and Google Cloud Console.

  The rollout includes tools for function-calling, multimodal input, and tight integration with Workspace add-ons.

  The move places Gemini directly against OpenAI’s API stack — but with Google’s massive cloud infrastructure behind it.

• 3. OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Go Free for India (Oct 28 Announcement / Begins Nov 4)

  In a surprise region-first move, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Go — the lightweight subscription tier that includes GPT-5 access — will be free for Indian users for one year, starting Nov 4.

  The offer is part of a push to expand ChatGPT’s reach in emerging markets, following record mobile adoption across Asia.

• 4. Microsoft Azure Faces Global Outage (Oct 30)

  Just days after AWS published its post-mortem, Microsoft Azure suffered its own global outage caused by a configuration change in Azure Front Door traffic management.

  The disruption affected enterprise applications, Outlook web access, and Power Platform integrations.

  Service was restored after 2 hours, but the twin outages reignited debate on the resilience of hyperscale clouds.

• 5. Apple Ships M5 Macs as “Scary Fast” Event Wraps Up (Oct 29)

  Apple’s October event, dubbed “Scary Fast,” officially closed with the first M5 MacBook Pro and Vision Pro M5 units shipping to customers.

  Early reviews highlight dramatic battery gains and AI performance leaps thanks to the 3 nm architecture and 60 TOPS neural engine.

  Apple also hinted at macOS updates designed to harness on-device AI optimizations for creative apps.

🔐 Security & Outages

• The AWS and Azure events bookend a critical week for cloud operators. Both giants pledged greater transparency and independent resilience audits as part of their 2026 SLA revisions.

🏗 Industry Moves

• Google strengthens its Gemini developer ecosystem amid rising competition from Anthropic and OpenAI.
• OpenAI’s India push could signal regional pricing diversification ahead of its Enterprise API expansion.
• Apple reasserts its silicon leadership with M5 shipments as AI-optimized hardware goes mainstream.

🔭 Trend to Watch

• The Age of AI Access & Cloud Fragility

  This week underscored a dual reality — AI capabilities are becoming more accessible than ever, but the cloud backbones powering them remain alarmingly fragile.

  Expect 2026 to see renewed investments in multi-cloud redundancy and client-side AI execution.

✍ Closing Note

That’s your week, rethought ✨ — free AI for India, new tools for developers, and a reality check for the cloud giants that run our digital world.

Catch you next weekend with fresh signals from the tech cosmos.