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Microsoft’s pledge to let Microsoft 365 Copilot process interaction data inside India by the end of 2025 marks a decisive step in the company’s sovereignty play — one that blends performance gains with governance controls and could materially change how Indian public bodies and regulated firms buy generative‑AI services. Microsoft’s official announcement says Copilot customers in four markets — Australia, the United Kingdom, India and Japan — will have the option to route Copilot prompts...

Microsoft acknowledged an infrastructure incident affecting its West Europe Azure region after a news report said a “thermal event” in a Netherlands datacenter knocked multiple storage scale units offline and produced degraded performance across Virtual Machines, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Servers, MySQL Flexible Servers, Azure Kubernetes Service, Storage, Service Bus, Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Databricks workloads. Background / Overview The initial public signal for this...

Microsoft has quietly added a checkbox to the Microsoft Store web experience that changes a routine part of Windows setup: you can now select multiple apps in your browser, click a single “Install selected” button, download a tiny launcher .exe, run it, and have the Microsoft Store app on the target PC fetch and install every chosen title automatically. Background Since the early days of Windows, setting up a new PC has been a repetitive chore: visit dozens of vendor pages, download...

Microsoft has been forced into a rapid‑fire damage‑control exercise in Australia after the competition regulator took the company to federal court, alleging that the way Microsoft bundled its Copilot AI into consumer Microsoft 365 plans misled as many as 2.7 million Australians and nudged customers into higher‑priced subscriptions — a dispute that has already prompted public apologies, refund offers and legal exposure that could run into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars...

Microsoft’s new in‑house image model landed with a splash: MAI‑Image‑1 is already available inside Bing Image Creator and Copilot, it placed among the top models on public leaderboards, and early testers are finding the results fast, photoreal and surprisingly polished for a first release. Background / Overview Microsoft has publicly rolled out MAI‑Image‑1, its first fully in‑house text‑to‑image model, and integrated it into consumer surfaces including Bing Image Creator and the Copilot...

Pasco County Schools is moving from prohibition to scaffolding: district leaders have drafted a 19‑page AI guidebook and will begin a phased, managed rollout that gives high‑school students aged 13 and older limited access to Microsoft Copilot on December 1 while teachers retain classroom control and the district keeps policy under continuous review. Background Generative AI tools are already part of student life, and school systems are finally catching up. Pasco’s approach follows a growing...

Microsoft’s consumer Copilot rollout has landed the company in a high‑stakes federal court clash in Australia after the nation’s competition regulator accused Microsoft of misleading roughly 2.7 million Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers by bundling Copilot into those plans, raising renewal prices, and — the ACCC says — effectively hiding a lower‑cost “Classic” option until customers began the cancellation flow. Background Microsoft introduced Copilot as its consumer‑facing...

Microsoft and G42 announced a joint expansion that will add 200 megawatts of datacenter capacity to the UAE, part of a broader $15.2 billion investment program aimed at accelerating the country’s AI and cloud ambitions while pairing large-scale compute with new governance, skilling, and sustainability commitments. Background The UAE has been aggressively positioning itself as a regional and global hub for artificial intelligence and cloud services. Over the past two years, international...

Microsoft has confirmed a Windows Update bug that caused some Windows 10 PCs enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program to display a misleading “Your version of Windows has reached the end of support” banner — even though those systems remain entitled to and are still receiving security updates. Microsoft says the message is a display/diagnostic error introduced after the October cumulative update (tracked as KB5066791) and has deployed a cloud-side configuration fix with an...

Microsoft’s decision to end free support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 created an immediate policy and practical crisis — and community repair groups stepped into the breach, turning International Repair Day into a national and global campaign to keep functioning machines in use rather than in landfill. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) ran a series of “Fix‑a‑thon” events that recruited volunteers, refurbished hardware, and reimaged machines with alternative, actively...

Microsoft has confirmed a display bug that caused some Windows 10 PCs enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program — and certain LTSC/IoT LTSC SKUs — to show a startling “Your version of Windows has reached the end of support” banner in Settings → Windows Update, even though those devices remained entitled to and continued receiving security updates. Background / Overview Windows 10’s mainstream servicing officially ended on October 14, 2025. That milestone signaled the end of...

Microsoft quietly pushed a small, non‑disruptive Windows 11 Insider quality update this week — Build 26220.7052 — that doesn’t require a reboot and is explicitly intended as a test of Microsoft’s servicing pipeline, not as a feature or bug‑fix release. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Windows Insider channels exist to test and validate Windows changes before they land broadly: the Canary, Dev, Beta, and Release Preview channels each serve different roles in the preview lifecycle. In recent...

Microsoft has quietly delivered a long‑requested repair: the “Update and shut down” option in Windows 11 (and the corresponding servicing path for affected Windows 10 configurations) now behaves as labeled in preview builds and the October 28, 2025 optional preview cumulative update (KB5067036), addressing an intermittent bug that for years left machines powered on after applying updates instead of powering them off. Background / Overview For many users the Start menu prompt Update and shut...

Microsoft has quietly closed a small but maddening gap between label and behavior: the Start‑menu option “Update and shut down” in Windows now behaves like it says in recent Windows 11 preview builds and the October 28, 2025 optional cumulative preview (KB5067036), addressing a long‑running servicing orchestration bug that left some machines powered on after applying updates. Background For many Windows users the phrase Update and shut down was meant to be a convenience: apply pending...

Microsoft’s consumer-facing Copilot rollout has produced a high‑stakes regulatory confrontation in Australia: the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) says roughly 2.7 million Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers were misled about renewal choices after Copilot was bundled into those plans, and the dispute has now widened to include claims that Microsoft apologised and offered refunds to affected customers — a claim reported by some outlets but not yet clearly...

The upcoming IPWatchdog webinar on November 20, 2025, frames a question that has quietly become central to every patent shop and in‑house IP team: when should you reach for a general‑purpose AI like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, and when does the task demand an IP‑specific AI trained and engineered for patent drafting, claim optimization, and office‑action responses? Background AI adoption in intellectual property workflows has moved past pilots and proofs‑of‑concept into everyday practice...

Microsoft’s decision to apologise and offer refunds after Australia’s consumer watchdog took the company to court marks a pivotal moment in how Big Tech must communicate AI-driven changes to subscription products—and it raises probing questions about transparency, UX design and regulatory appetite for policing the monetisation of generative AI. Background In late 2024 Microsoft began integrating its generative-AI assistant, Copilot, into consumer Microsoft 365 plans. The integration was...

Accenture Ireland has appointed Wendy Walsh as its new Talent & Organisation Lead, a move that signals renewed focus on people-centred transformation as organisations in Ireland grapple with rapid AI adoption, hybrid work models, and the need to reskill at scale. Background Accenture’s Talent & Organisation (T&O) practice sits at the intersection of human resources, organisational design, leadership development and technology-enabled workforce transformation. The Ireland market — home to...

Google’s experimental AI Mode in Search has taken a decisive step from “find-it-for-me” to do-it-for-me: Search Labs users in the U.S. can now ask Google’s AI to hunt real‑time availability and surface direct booking links for restaurant reservations, event tickets, and beauty & wellness appointments — effectively turning Search into an agentic, digital concierge that does the legwork across third‑party booking sites. Background / Overview AI Mode launched earlier in 2025 as Google’s...

Microsoft has confirmed that a display bug introduced after October’s cumulative updates is incorrectly telling some paid Extended Security Updates (ESU) customers that their Windows 10 installations have “reached the end of support,” even though those devices remain entitled to and continue receiving security patches. Background Microsoft formally ended mainstream support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and released the final broad monthly cumulative updates for the consumer servicing...