AWS outage | Google AI cancer breakthrough | Claude Code launch | LangChain is a unicorn

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Massive Amazon outage takes down Venmo, Snapchat, Alexa, Reddit and much of the internet
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• A significant outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hit the US-East-1 region early on 20 October 2025, affecting many web services including Snapchat, Fortnite, Alexa, and Ring.

• The root cause was reported to be a DNS and network-connectivity problem within AWS’s internal EC2 and Load-Balancer infrastructure rather than a cyber-attack.

• Many downstream services recovered, but the incident underscores how a failure at a single cloud-infrastructure provider can ripple through large parts of the internet ecosystem.

How a Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway
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• Google DeepMind and collaborators used a model named C2S-Scale (27 billion parameters) built on the Gemma model family to analyse single-cell data and generate a novel hypothesis about making “cold” tumours visible to the immune system.

• The model identified a combination – a CK2 inhibitor (silmitasertib) together with low-dose interferon – which in lab tests increased antigen presentation by around 50% in neuroendocrine human cell models, making tumour cells more immune-visible.

• Google says this marks a milestone for AI in scientific discovery: the scaled model didn’t just optimise known tasks but generated new scientific ideas, signalling how foundation models may drive biological research.

Anthropic Introduces Claude Code on the web
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• Claude Code is a command-line and agentic coding tool by Anthropic that can map entire codebases, understand dependencies, make edits, submit pull-requests, and integrate with GitHub or GitLab, enabling powerful multi-file edits from terminal workflows.

• The tool works by “agentic search” over project context rather than requiring manual file selection; it aims to automate tedious developer tasks like merge conflicts, lint fixes, and PR creation.

• The launch reflects the broader trend of AI going beyond chatbots into developer productivity and code-automation tools — positioning coding workflows as a fertile domain for large-language-model applications.

LangChain is now a unicorn with a fresh $125 million in funding
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• LangChain, an early startup in the AI infrastructure space enabling developers to build LLM-powered applications, announced a new 125 million-dollar Series B funding round, elevating it into unicorn status with a valuation above 1 billion dollars.

• The company’s tools and framework focus on connecting large language models with external data, APIs, workflows, and production-grade applications — an increasingly critical layer in the AI stack.

• With this funding, LangChain plans to expand enterprise offerings, deepen integrations, scale infrastructure, and support more complex and large-scale AI deployments in the coming months.