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The countdown to October 14, 2025 is no longer a background calendar item — it’s an operational deadline that transforms a routine OS migration into a strategic modernization program that can materially reduce risk, lower support cost, and prepare staff for an AI-first workplace by refreshing fleets with Windows 11 and AI‑capable PCs from HP, delivered and managed through channel partners such as Compugen. Background / Overview Windows 10 reaches official end of support on October 14, 2025...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a long‑anticipated redesign of the Windows 11 Start menu, delivered as an optional, non‑security preview update (KB5067036) that introduces a single, scrollable Start surface, multiple “All apps” layout modes, deeper Phone Link integration, and more granular personalization controls aimed at restoring discoverability and user choice to the OS. Background Since Windows 11’s launch, the Start menu has been one of the most contentious parts of the user...

Microsoft’s long-running experiment with the Windows 11 Start menu has finally produced a visible, usable redesign — and the October 28, 2025 preview (KB5067036) makes it clear Microsoft is trying to fix the single biggest usability gripe users had with Windows 11: the split, click-heavy Start experience that hid the full apps list behind a secondary page. Background The Start menu is one of Windows’ oldest and most consequential interface elements. Over three decades it has been refined...

Microsoft's cloud fabric hiccupped on Wednesday afternoon, knocking Microsoft 365, Xbox and Minecraft — and a raft of dependent services — offline for many users as Azure engineers raced to rollback an edge configuration and reroute traffic through healthy infrastructure. Background: what we know so far Microsoft’s incident centered on Azure Front Door (AFD) — the company’s global edge, CDN and traffic‑management service that terminates TLS, applies WAF rules, and routes HTTP/S traffic to...

A widespread Microsoft Azure outage on October 29, 2025 knocked Microsoft 365 services offline for millions of users worldwide, leaving Teams, Outlook on the web, the Azure Portal and Xbox authentication flows disrupted for several hours while Microsoft worked to roll back an inadvertent configuration change to its Azure Front Door (AFD) edge routing fabric. Background Microsoft Azure is one of the world’s three hyperscale public clouds and hosts not only customer workloads but also a large...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone faltered on October 29, 2025, when an Azure outage traced to a suspected inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) disrupted Microsoft 365, the Azure management portal, Xbox and Minecraft authentication, and a raft of third‑party sites — including retail and airline systems — forcing engineers into a global rollback and emergency traffic‑recovery mode. Background Azure is one of the world’s three hyperscale cloud platforms and Microsoft builds...

A widespread outage that knocked large swathes of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 offline on October 29, 2025 began to ease after several hours of disruption, but the incident underscores deep operational and architectural risks for businesses that treat cloud providers as single points of failure. Background / Overview On October 29 Microsoft reported that an inadvertent configuration change to part of its Azure infrastructure — specifically affecting Azure Front Door (AFD), Microsoft’s...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a major update to the Copilot app on Windows that brings Vision with text‑in, text‑out to Windows Insiders — letting users type questions about whatever they share on screen and receive text replies in the same Copilot chat window, while retaining the ability to switch to voice mid‑session. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot platform has been evolving quickly from a sidebar chat helper into a system‑level, multimodal assistant for Windows 11. That...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric suffered a major, wide‑ranging disruption that left customers — from gamers to airlines and enterprise admins — facing timeouts, failed sign‑ins and blank management portals as engineers worked to roll back changes and restore edge routing capacity. Background / Overview On October 29, 2025, Microsoft experienced a significant outage that affected Azure, Microsoft 365 admin surfaces and a host of consumer and third‑party services. The disruption began as routing and...

I watched my SSD’s free space drop by tens of gigabytes over a few weeks, and a tiny, almost unassuming tool called WizTree exposed the invisible culprits in seconds — a reminder that the fastest path to reclaimed storage is often a map, not more guessing. Background / Overview Modern PCs juggle more ephemeral data than ever: browser caches, game caches, container images, temp installers, system restore points, update leftovers, and writable system files like pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys...

Microsoft appears to be preparing a narrow, device‑targeted Windows 11 release early next year that — if the leaks are accurate — will ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 family but won’t be available immediately to the vast majority of Windows 11 PCs. Background / Overview Microsoft’s modern servicing model already separates the presence of new features in Windows from the moment they’re activated. The company often ships feature binaries quietly as part of the shared servicing branch...

The Windows 10 sunset has done something unusual for a product lifecycle event: it has created a two‑stage circular economy where today’s resale market and tomorrow’s “urban mining” supply chain are tightly coupled. Refurbishers are buying back fleets of Dell Latitudes, HP EliteBooks and Lenovo ThinkPads, reinstalling Windows 10 Pro, and selling dependable machines that otherwise would have been pushed toward disposal—buying time for users, preserving value for companies, and simultaneously...

I switched my primary development environment from Linux back to Windows — and the result was far less compromise and far more productivity than I expected, thanks to modern Windows tools like WSL2, Windows Terminal, PowerToys, and winget that finally blur the lines between the two ecosystems. Overview What began as a personal experiment — moving a daily-driver dev setup off Linux and onto Windows — has become a useful case study in how far Windows has evolved as a developer platform. The...

Microsoft’s optional preview update KB5067036 lands in the Release Preview channel with two of the most visible changes Windows users have asked for in years — a new just‑in‑time Administrator Protection model that binds elevation to user verification, and color‑coded battery icons that make Taskbar battery status immediately legible at a glance — alongside a broad set of Start menu, File Explorer, Copilot, accessibility, and reliability updates. Background / Overview KB5067036 is a...

Microsoft is rolling a quiet but meaningful change into the Windows 11 Insider builds: after an unexpected restart or BSOD, Windows may now proactively offer to run a memory diagnostic at the next reboot to help determine whether RAM corruption played a role in the crash. Background Memory failures and memory-related corruption are a perennial source of instability on Windows PCs. The line between a hardware fault in a DIMM, an overclocking/XMP/EXPO-induced instability, firmware/BIOS issues...

Microsoft's cloud infrastructure faltered Wednesday afternoon, triggering a widespread Azure outage that knocked out access to multiple first‑party services — notably Xbox game downloads, Minecraft online services, and the Azure management portal — and forced Microsoft engineers to halt changes to the Azure Front Door (AFD) routing layer while they attempt a rollback to a safe configuration. Background / Overview The incident began at approximately 16:00 UTC when Microsoft detected...

Players and IT teams worldwide woke to a sudden, large-scale interruption of Microsoft services on October 29 — an Azure Front Door (AFD) disruption triggered by an inadvertent configuration change that produced timeouts, authentication failures, and cascading outages across Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, Xbox Network and Minecraft, while engineers rolled back to a last‑known‑good configuration and temporarily blocked further AFD changes. Background / Overview Microsoft Azure’s global...

Microsoft's cloud fabric suffered a major, global disruption today when Azure Front Door (AFD) experienced a configuration-related DNS failure that rippled across Azure, Microsoft 365, Xbox services and a wide set of customer sites — leaving administrators scrambling, consumers locked out of games and apps, and enterprises reliant on Azure scrambling through programmatic workarounds and contingency plans. Background Microsoft’s Azure Front Door is a global, edge-based HTTP/HTTPS entry point...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric hit a major snag on October 29, 2025, when an Azure outage knocked users out of Teams, Outlook, Xbox, Microsoft Store and multiple admin portals — an incident traced to failures in Azure Front Door and related DNS/edge routing that produced cascading sign‑in and portal errors across enterprise and consumer services. Background The outage began as a loss of availability and DNS/addressing anomalies at Microsoft’s edge layer, Azure Front Door (AFD), and quickly...

A widespread outage that knocked large swathes of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Microsoft 365 productivity services offline on October 29, 2025 began to ease after several hours of global disruption, but the incident exposed persistent fragility in cloud-dependent business operations and reignited debate over architecture, redundancy and vendor risk management. Background / Overview On October 29, 2025, customers across industries reported interruptions to Azure-hosted services...