2025 highlights: October

Technology highlights for October 2025 included:

- Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered an outage that affected services globally, including for Asana, Slack, and Zoom. 

Darren Guccione, CEO And Co-Founder, Keeper Security commented: "While major Internet outages often raise immediate concerns of a cyberattack, current reports indicate the significant AWS disruption was caused by an internal infrastructure fault, rather than malicious activity. It’s an important distinction, as not every system’s failure is the result of a cybersecurity breach, and conflating the two can blur understanding of where the real risks lie. 

"Modern IT ecosystems are complex, interconnected and highly dependent on a handful of critical cloud providers. When an incident of this scale occurs, whether through technical failure or misconfiguration, the impact on global operations can be just as severe as a coordinated cyberattack.

"For enterprise organisations, this underscores the need for resilience that goes beyond threat prevention. Business continuity plans should account for both cyber and non-cyber disruptions, ensuring that privileged access, authentication and backup systems remain secure and functional, even when core infrastructure is affected.

Zero-Trust frameworks and privileged access management (PAM) solutions are designed to protect against malicious actors, however, they can also play a critical role in maintaining visibility and control during system outages, while improving a customer's resilience and incident response capabilities. True resilience isn’t just about preventing attacks; it’s about ensuring stability when failures occur."

- Anthropic opens a Tokyo office, its first in the Asia-Pacific region. 

- Ericsson said it will manufacture all telecom equipment meant for India within the country.

- Google announced its 1st AI hub in India as part of a US$15 B investment spent over five years, from 2026 to 2030. This is Google's largest investment in India to date.  

- Microsoft's Copilot updates are more human-centred and include a US-only version of the Clippy assistant, named Mico.  

- NVIDIA Blackwell, the company's architecture for AI and high-performance computing, led the new SemiAnalysis InferenceMAX v1 benchmarks, delivering the highest performance and best overall efficiency. InferenceMax v1 is the first independent benchmark to measure total cost of compute across a range of models and real-world scenarios.

The company also announced a slew of partnerships with the South Korean government as well as chaebols to advance the national ambition to become a global AI hub. 

- Qualcomm Technologies announced it will acquire Arduino, an open-source hardware and software company. Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers.  

Qualcomm also launched the AI200 and AI250 chip-based accelerator cards and racks for optimised AI inferencing in data centres. 

- Singapore and Australia upgraded the Singapore-Australia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP 2.0). Initiatives to be implemented over the next 10 years included memoranda of understanding (MoUs) EnterpriseSG and the states of New South Wales and Victoria that include innovation ecosystem access. The MoU with New South Wales includes fintech, medtech, cleantech, transport and mobility technology as well as sustainability innovations. The MoU with Victoria includes offshore wind, energy storage, renewable hydrogen, bio energy, medtech, and digital health. 

- SoftBank Group said it would acquire ABB's robotics business for approximately US$5.4 B. ABB is a global technology provider in electrification and automation. 

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