If the weather is "bad" then the AP is coming on almost immediately after gear retraction and climb established. Even if they did hand fly the departure, they shouldn't have been doing anything but adjusting pitch and speed to keep flight director indications centered on their artificial horizon
So, the 777 PW engine blew up over Denver. A 747 freighter had an engine fail on a flight from Netherlands to NYC. And another 777 had to make an emergency landing on a flight from Seattle to Atlanta on Monday...
Just odd to have that many instances so close together. There’s probably little to no connection unless those aircraft had been grounded until recently by the pandemic and just fired back up...