The Winners Of The AI Boom You Never Thought About

The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it guaranteed or your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans, or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com/podcast. Terms apply. Welcome to the tech brew right home for Monday, 10/20/2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, big AWS outage took down half the Internet overnight. X wants you to be able to snap up dormant or desirable X handles. Blackwell chips look like they've finally hit volume production in The US. And you know who else is benefiting from the AI boom? Crypto miners and makers of plain old cables. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. As I am typing this, there are still a few residual problems I've been noticing around the web all morning. But overnight, there was a big AWS outage that took down a bunch of things, including Amazon, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and Snapchat. AWS says the underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most operations are succeeding normally now after a major US East 1 outage beginning at 03:11AM eastern time, quoting The Verge. As of 06:35AM eastern time, the AWS status checker is reporting that most AWS service operations are succeeding normally now, and some of the impacted platforms, including Fortnite, Epic Games Store, and Perplexity have announced that they are fully recovered and back online. However, as of 09:50AM eastern time, Amazon says that multiple services in The US East 1 region are still impacted by operational issues and that it is working towards a full resolution. The AWS dashboard first reported issues affecting The US East 1 region at 03:11AM eastern time with global services and other regions also taken offline. The cause of the outage hasn't been confirmed, and it's unclear when regular service will be fully restored. Users on Reddit reported that the Alexa smart assistant was down and unable to respond to queries or complete requests. And in my own experience, I found that routines like preset alarms were not functioning. The AWS issue also impacted platforms running on its cloud network, including Airtable, Canva, and the McDonald's app. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand the root cause, Amazon said in an update published at 03:51AM eastern time. In a 05:27AM eastern time update, Amazon said we are seeing significant signs of recovery. Most requests should now be succeeding. We continue to work through a backlog of queued requests, end quote. OpenAI says it has paused Sora's ability to generate videos resembling Martin Luther King Junior at the request of his estate after some users created what they called, quote, disrespectful depictions, quoting TechCrunch. While there are …