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- Product & Design Pulse v63
Product & Design Pulse v63
AWS is the Internet, for better or worse š
Malcom Jones
October 27, 2025
Welcome to this weekās edition of Product & Design Pulse, where we explore the latest in tech, product, design, and innovation! AWS published a detailed postmortem on its October outage, pledging stronger safeguards and faster recovery processes to prevent another global service disruption. Reddit sued Perplexity AI over alleged data scraping and copyright violationsāsetting up what could become a defining case for content ownership in the AI era. Meta laid off 600 employees in a major AI division reorg as it consolidated teams into a new āSuperintelligenceā unit, while more than 1,000 researchers and executives signed the global Superalignment Statement calling for international cooperation on safe AI development. And Ben Thompsonās latest Stratechery piece tied it all together, using the AWS incident to explore how resilienceānot just scaleāwill shape the next generation of cloud and AI infrastructure.
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Last weekā¦
AWS issued a detailed postmortem on the October 19, 2025 service disruption, outlining the root cause, the blast radius across multiple services, and the duration of customer impact. The company says it is adding new safeguards and rollout procedures (including additional isolation, staged deployments, and improved failover paths) to prevent a repeat. AWS also committed to better real-time communications and follow-up reliability work across the affected systems.
Reddit Sues Perplexity Over Data Scraping and Copyright Violations ā The Verge
Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of illegally scraping data and violating its terms of service. The complaint alleges that Perplexityās AI models were trained on Reddit content without permission, echoing broader tensions between AI firms and online platforms. The case could set a key precedent for how user-generated content is licensed in the AI era.
Meta Reorganizes AI Division and Lays Off 600 Employees ā Axios
Meta announced a major restructuring of its AI division, laying off around 600 employees as it merges multiple teams into a new āSuperintelligenceā unit. The reorganization consolidates Metaās GenAI, FAIR research, and infrastructure groups to streamline development and focus on long-term AI goals. The company says the changes are meant to improve efficiency and competitiveness, though the cuts highlight internal tension as Meta pivots from experimental projects to large-scale, production-ready AI systems.
The Superalignment Statement: Global Call for Responsible AI Development
Over 1,000 AI researchers and executives signed the āSuperalignment Statement,ā calling for international cooperation on safe and transparent development of advanced AI systems. The declaration emphasizes shared research, safety testing, and open communication between governments and companies. It reflects growing global consensus around the need for proactive governance before superintelligent AI becomes a reality.
Resiliency and Scale ā Stratechery
Ben Thompson uses the recent AWS outage as a lens to explore the trade-offs between scalability, efficiency, and resilience in modern cloud infrastructure. He argues that hyperscalersā pursuit of massive scale often introduces fragility, and that true resilience requires designing for redundancy and failure recoveryānot just performance. The piece highlights how the outage underscores a broader lesson for both cloud providers and AI companies increasingly dependent on centralized compute.
