Featured content

Microsoft’s apology and refund offer to roughly 2.7 million Australian Microsoft 365 subscribers follows a formal legal challenge by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which alleges the company misled customers about subscription choices after integrating its Copilot AI assistant — and has turned what began as a pricing update into a regulatory test of how tech companies communicate AI upgrades and price changes. Background The dispute traces to the integration of...

Microsoft has apologised to customers in Australia and New Zealand and begun offering refunds after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) opened Federal Court proceedings alleging Microsoft misled roughly 2.7 million Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers by obscuring a lower‑cost, non‑AI “Classic” option while rolling its Copilot AI into consumer plans and raising renewal prices. Background / Overview Microsoft’s consumer AI, Copilot, was folded into Microsoft 365...

Microsoft’s internal controls for reporting ethical concerns have been expanded to include a formal channel for flagging potential human‑rights and policy risks tied to the development and deployment of its technology, a move announced by company President Brad Smith as part of a broader response to an internal review prompted by reporting on the use of Microsoft technology in Israeli military surveillance operations. Background / Overview In August and September, a wave of investigative...

Bill Gates’ wry on-stage line—“That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet”—has become one of technology’s most enduring demo gaffes, but the fallout was more than an awkward clip: the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) that occurred during the COMDEX Windows 98 demo changed how Microsoft staged public shows and even altered the architecture of a production facility on the Redmond campus. What began as a single public failure of plug‑and‑play USB support turned into a company-wide lesson in...

Microsoft is quietly rolling back one of Windows 11’s longest-running UX complaints: the cramped, repetitive, and hard-to-navigate right-click context menu in File Explorer — and the fix, as reported from community previews and developer channels, is a new “Split Context Menu” design driven by a WinUI control that lets a single menu row act as both a primary action and a compact nested menu for related commands. Background: why the right-click menu became a problem For more than two decades...

Microsoft’s rapid Copilot rollout has collided with Australia’s consumer law: the company has apologised to affected Microsoft 365 subscribers and begun offering refunds after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) launched Federal Court proceedings alleging millions were misled by renewal communications that obscured a lower‑cost, non‑AI alternative. Background The dispute centres on Microsoft’s integration of Copilot, its generative‑AI assistant, into consumer Microsoft...

Pasco County Schools will allow limited student access to Microsoft Copilot beginning December 1, a cautiously staged move that formalizes months of teacher pilots and places the district among a growing number of Florida systems shifting from blanket bans to managed adoption of generative AI in K–12 classrooms. Background and overview Pasco’s decision follows a national momentum: school districts that previously prohibited student use of consumer chatbots are now experimenting with...

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...