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On the morning of January 13, 2026 a flurry of posts and screenshots on community forums and social channels asked the same blunt question: Is Microsoft Copilot down? The short answer for most users is no, not globally — but the full picture is more complex: Copilot has experienced intermittent, regionally scoped degradations in recent weeks, a series of model-provider incidents in early January, and a platform-specific discontinuation (Copilot on WhatsApp) that has added to user confusion...

Copilot’s arrival inside GroupMe turns a once-simple group-messaging app into a practical, AI-assisted workspace where planning, catch-ups, and creative collaboration happen without leaving the chat window. Background / Overview Microsoft has embedded Copilot directly into GroupMe so users can summon the assistant from any group conversation by mentioning @Copilot, and can also use it in one‑on‑one direct messages for private prompts. This in‑chat integration is designed to reduce app...

Microsoft 365 Copilot has gone from curious demo to a practical productivity layer across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams and the standalone Copilot app — and the difference for busy teams is now measurable. The core promise is simple: spend less time on repetitive drafting, meeting wrangling, and data triage by delegating first drafts, summaries, and routine actions to an AI that is grounded in your work data and web sources. This feature-driven guide synthesizes the most actionable...

For many organisations the move to the cloud has already happened — workloads have been migrated, virtual machines spun up, and SaaS rolled out — yet the expected payoff in agility, scalability and faster innovation often remains elusive. The distinction Luke Bainbridge draws in ITWeb — that cloud adoption is not the same as cloud maturity — is the blunt truth behind stalled cloud projects and an opportunity for partners to move from transactional suppliers to strategic enablers. Background...

Zorin OS 18 has crossed the seven-figure mark: the distro’s developers say the new release has been downloaded more than one million times in just over a month, and that a striking majority of those downloads—over 78%—originated from Windows computers, a metric the project is using to argue that many Windows 10 users are actively exploring Linux as a practical alternative. Background The announcement from Zorin Group arrived in the immediate aftermath of Microsoft’s formal end of free...

Microsoft has quietly given administrators a supported — if deliberately narrow — way to uninstall the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices by shipping a new Group Policy setting in the Insider Preview that uninstalls the app when strict conditions are met. Background / Overview Since Copilot became a first-class element of Windows 11, Microsoft has delivered multiple, overlapping Copilot experiences: the free consumer Microsoft Copilot app that ships or is...

The web browser you choose matters more than you think: it shapes privacy, performance, productivity and — increasingly — how AI and platform services interact with everything you do online. A recent roundup of four standout alternatives intentionally omits Google Chrome and makes a strong case for Opera, Zen Browser, Tor Browser, and FireDragon as practical, high‑value options for different use cases. The original roundup frames its choices around tab management, built‑in convenience...

Microsoft has quietly added a narrowly scoped but important admin control to Windows 11: a Group Policy named RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp that can perform a one‑time uninstall of the consumer Microsoft Copilot app on managed devices — but it only runs under strict conditions (Insider preview Build 26220.7535 / KB5072046) and is deliberately designed as a targeted cleanup tool rather than a universal “kill switch.” Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot effort has become a multi‑layered...

A small, open-source PowerShell project has reignited a debate that’s been simmering since Microsoft began folding large language models into the Windows desktop: a developer calling themselves zoicware published a script that promises to remove virtually all AI features from Windows 11 (25H2 and later). The project — published on GitHub as RemoveWindowsAI and quickly mirrored and forked across sites — bundles registry tweaks, AppX removals, Component-Based Servicing (CBS) cleaning and a...

For many Windows 10 users nursing an older ATI/AMD card back to life, the path to a usable display driver is less about magic and more about procedure: accept Microsoft’s signed fallback where practical, use OEM drivers when available, and—only when necessary—perform a cautious manual install of an archived Catalyst/legacy package after a full backup and a clean driver removal. Community-tested workflows and vendor guidance converge on a conservative sequence that maximizes stability while...

Microsoft has quietly given administrators a narrowly scoped way to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices, but the escape hatch is deliberately limited: the removal is a one‑time, conditional uninstall that depends on exact prerequisites and does not eliminate Copilot integrations or the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot service. Background Microsoft’s Copilot family has grown into a multi‑layered set of experiences inside Windows and Microsoft 365. That family...

Microsoft is quietly testing a targeted, admin-facing way to remove the consumer Microsoft Copilot app from managed Windows 11 devices: a new Group Policy named RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp delivered in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) that performs a conditional, one‑time uninstall when strict criteria are met. Background Microsoft has been integrating Copilot across Windows and Microsoft 365 for several release cycles, producing overlapping experiences that include the...

AI personal‑finance assistants are no longer curiosities — they are practical tools that can speed up budgeting, summarize dense plan documents, and automate spreadsheet work, but choosing the right one requires matching capabilities to where your data lives, how much auditability you need, and how you plan to verify results. Background AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic Claude have moved from experimental chatbots to integrated productivity...

Windows Server “Longhorn” wasn’t merely a codename and a set of screenshots — it was the inflection point where Microsoft rethought how Windows would be administered, secured, and automated in the datacenter, and the archived PCMag image gallery serves as a useful time capsule for that transition. Background / Overview Longhorn originally described an ambitious and wide‑ranging engineering effort that touched both client and server code paths; the server lineage that grew out of that work...

Algolia’s new partnership with Microsoft signals a decisive shift in how product data will power the next generation of AI-native shopping — moving real-time, retailer-approved attributes (pricing, inventory, enriched metadata) into agentic surfaces like Copilot, Bing Shopping, and Edge so merchants can influence what customers see when purchases begin off-site. Background / Overview The retail discovery funnel is changing. Where shoppers once began with on-site search, marketplaces, or...

Oracle’s multicloud database play accelerated sharply in 2025, with Oracle Database@Azure moving from a niche co‑location experiment into a broad, production-ready platform that now hosts Exadata on Exascale, a VM-based Base Database Service, an AI-native Autonomous AI Lakehouse, and native replication and observability integrations with Azure — a set of changes that materially lowers the friction for running Oracle operational data alongside Azure analytics and AI services. Background /...

Microsoft has abruptly retired the long‑standing Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), leaving administrators who still depend on its lightweight, offline imaging workflows to scramble for backups, migration plans, and immediate mitigations. Background The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) has been a staple of Windows provisioning for more than two decades. It offered a free, scriptable set of tools — including the Deployment Workbench, task‑sequencing engine, WinPE boot media generation...

Windows 11’s AI experiment has a new nickname: “Microslop,” and the joke just graduated into tooling — a browser extension that replaces every on‑page instance of “Microsoft” with “Microslop” is circulating across browser stores and social platforms, turning user anger into a visible, repeatable protest against the company’s aggressive Copilot push. Background Microsoft’s Copilot strategy began as an experiment in late 2022 and early 2023, when Bing Chat (later unified under the Copilot...

AI personal‑finance assistants have moved from novelty chatbots to practical productivity tools, but choosing between ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic Claude now comes down less to flashy model claims and more to where your financial data lives, what governance you require, and how you plan to verify outputs. Background AI assistants are no longer judged solely on conversational fluency. For personal finance workflows — budgeting, transaction reconciliation, long PDF...

Amazon’s move to bring a native Prime Video app to Windows 10 — and with it, the long‑awaited ability to download titles for offline viewing on laptops and desktops — finally closed a persistent feature gap between mobile devices and the PC. The Windows 10 Prime Video app, distributed through the Microsoft Store and built as a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) experience, delivers a Store‑managed installer, a desktop‑oriented UI, and the same download controls that mobile Prime Video users...