This Week’s Top 5 Stories in Technology
AWS Down: The Billion-Dollar Impact of Cloud Dependency
Earlier this week, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage wreaked havoc for a wide array of websites and apps, with millions of users facing disruption.
“We can confirm significant error rates for requests made to the DynamoDB endpoint in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said in a statement. “This issue also affects other AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region as well.
“During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases.
“Engineers were immediately engaged and are actively working on both mitigating the issue, and fully understanding the root cause.”
Disruption at Amazon's North Virginia data centres were affecting core services including DynamoDB and EC2: the database and computing foundations that thousands of companies rent to power their applications.
When these foundational services fail, it creates an immediate and widespread ripple effect, impacting everything from gaming platforms to banking applications.
This outage serves as yet another stark reminder of a cloud computing reality: the infrastructure behind digital services are far more fragile than most users realise.
Kyndryl Report Reveals AI Returns Amid Infrastructure Gaps
Kyndryl has released its second annual Readiness Report, surveying 3,700 senior leaders across 21 countries to assess how enterprises are managing AI adoption, infrastructure modernisation and workforce transformation.
The report identifies a pattern where confidence in existing capabilities exceeds actual readiness. Martin Schroeter, Chairman and CEO of Kyndryl, says: “A readiness gap exists as enterprises grapple with the promise of transformative value from AI.
“While 90% of organisations think they have the tools and processes to scale innovation, more than half are stalled by their tech stack and less than a third say their employees are truly ready for AI. Closing that gap is the challenge and opportunity ahead.”
Gartner: Agentic AI to Define Next Wave of Enterprise ROI
A warning from the International Monetary Fund’s recent forecast warns that markets may be “excessively optimistic” about the profit potential of AI, fuelled by growth concentrated in a handful of major players.
This, Gartner warns, comes at a critical inflexion point for CIOs planning their next moves.
The business and technology insights business’ caution coincides with the release of its 2026 CIO & Technology Executive Survey, which captures the shifting ambitions and anxieties of 2,500 global CIOs and technology executives.
The findings show a world eager to spend on AI that is increasingly divided by regulation, geopolitics and expectations for return on investment.
Channel 4: Will an AI Presenter Take Over its Broadcasting?
In a move that could signal a new frontier in broadcasting, Channel 4 used an AI-generated presenter for a documentary, revealing the technological deception only in the programme's final moments.
The show, Will AI Take My Job? Dispatches, saw viewers follow what they believed to be a human presenter investigating the impact of automation on various professions.
This broadcast serves as a practical demonstration of the current state of generative AI and raises questions about its application in media.
The programme's presenter narrated segments, appeared to conduct interviews and reported from multiple locations.
The twist was delivered at the documentary’s conclusion. “AI is going to touch everybody’s lives in the next few years. And for some, it will take their jobs,” the presenter states, before revealing its own nature: “Because I’m not real. In a British TV first, I’m an AI presenter.” The admission was designed to highlight the deceptive potential of artificial intelligence.
How Will Google Cloud AI Reshape THG Ingenuity Ecommerce?
THG Ingenuity and Google Cloud have announced a move that will see the digital commerce provider migrate its infrastructure to Google’s cloud platform and integrate AI capabilities across its operations.
The partnership involves a migration of THG Ingenuity’s ecommerce and fulfilment infrastructure to Google Cloud’s platform. This includes moving applications and legacy systems to a more scalable foundation, with the infrastructure shift to support future market expansions and acquisitions.
Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform provides a unified environment for building, deploying and scaling machine learning models. The platform handles the infrastructure complexity of training and serving AI models, allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than backend management. Vertex AI supports custom model development as well as pre-trained models for common tasks like image recognition and natural language processing.
THG Ingenuity will use Vertex AI to develop services across demand planning, product recommendations, storefront technology and fulfilment automation. These applications will be integrated into THG Ingenuity’s existing commerce platform, which combines ecommerce technology with fulfilment operations across three divisions: THG Commerce for ecommerce technology, THG Fulfil for fulfilment and courier management and THG Studios for creative services.
Gemini, Google’s family of multimodal AI models, can generate content, analyse patterns and perform reasoning tasks across different data types. For ecommerce applications, this multimodal capability enables analysis of product images alongside text descriptions, customer reviews and purchasing behaviour.
