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Microsoft’s optional October preview update for Windows 11, KB5067036, shipped a handful of visible improvements — a redesigned Start menu, colorful battery icons, and fixes for the Media Creation Tool — but it also appears to have introduced a surprising and insidious regression: closing Task Manager with the window “X” can leave the process running in the background, and each open/close cycle may spawn another taskmgr.exe instance that quietly consumes memory and CPU. The issue has been...

Microsoft’s Q1 2026 earnings call did more than report strong numbers — it laid out a practical, product-level vision for how AI will become the connective tissue of customer experience (CX), putting Copilot and multi‑agent orchestration at the center of service, security, and collaboration workflows. The implications for contact centers, CX teams, and enterprise service architects are profound: Copilot is being positioned as the default interface, multi‑agent frameworks now include...

Alaska Airlines’ digital services were knocked offline again this week after a global Microsoft Azure disruption that briefly prevented online check‑in and took parts of the carrier’s website and mobile app down, amplifying concerns about cloud dependency after the airline’s own, separate data‑center failure days earlier left thousands of passengers stranded and hundreds of flights canceled. Background Alaska’s most recent digital interruption was a downstream effect of a broader Microsoft...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric sputtered in a way that left email, collaboration, gaming and dozens of customer-facing websites unusable for hours — an outage Microsoft traced to an “inadvertent configuration change” in Azure Front Door that cascaded through routing, DNS and identity flows and forced an emergency rollback and traffic failover. Background Azure Front Door (AFD) is Microsoft’s global Layer‑7 edge and application delivery fabric: a combination of Anycast routing, TLS termination at...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone briefly collapsed on October 29 when an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) — Microsoft’s global Layer‑7 edge and application‑delivery fabric — propagated across the edge control plane, producing DNS, routing and authentication failures that knocked Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, Xbox/Minecraft sign‑in flows and thousands of customer websites and apps offline for several hours before engineers rolled back to a “last known good”...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric fractured in plain view on October 29, 2025, when a configuration error in Azure Front Door (AFD) — Microsoft’s global Layer‑7 edge and application delivery fabric — produced DNS and routing anomalies that cascaded into sign‑in failures, blank admin portals, and widespread outages across Microsoft 365, Azure management surfaces, Xbox Live, and Minecraft authentication for users worldwide. Background Azure Front Door is not a simple CDN; it is a globally distributed...

The past few weeks have turned into a crash course in how fragile our always‑on internet actually is: separate, high‑profile failures at Vodafone (and other telcos), a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 that knocked hundreds of sites offline, and a wide‑ranging Microsoft Azure outage on October 29 that left Xbox, Microsoft 365 and many enterprise services struggling to authenticate or load content — three distinct incidents that together exposed a set of recurring...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud suffered a high-impact, global disruption on October 29, 2025, after an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) produced DNS and routing failures that knocked Microsoft 365, Xbox services (including Minecraft), the Azure management portal and thousands of customer-facing sites into intermittent or full outage while engineers froze changes and rolled the service back to a last‑known‑good configuration. Background / Overview Azure Front Door is...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 update reimagines the Start menu into a single, vertically scrollable launcher that exposes the full “All apps” list on the main surface, adds three distinct viewing modes (Category, Grid and List), and gives users explicit controls to mute or remove the Recommended area — all delivered as a staged preview packaged under KB5067036. Background When Windows 11 launched, the Start menu favored a centered, tile-free design that separated Pinned apps from the...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone hiccupped on October 29, 2025, when an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) triggered a cascading, global outage that left Microsoft 365, Xbox/Minecraft, the Azure management plane and thousands of customer websites and services struggling with timeouts, sign‑in failures and 502/504 gateway errors for hours. Background Azure sits among the world’s hyperscale cloud leaders and operates a global edge and application‑delivery fabric called Azure...

Windows Update’s default behavior — download, install, repeat — is a convenience for many but a data bill nightmare for others, and a simple registry tweak that’s circulated in tech blogs and forums can extend Windows’ “Pause updates” well beyond the default limit so updates stop chewing through limited bandwidth when you’re on a hotspot or capped connection. Background Windows provides several built‑in controls to limit when and how updates download: the Pause updates control in Settings...

Microsoft’s latest preview-quality release for Windows 11 has backfired for a sizable number of users: the optional KB5044384 update, issued to address and polish aspects of Windows 11 24H2, introduced a Task Manager display bug that misreports process counts and, in some installs, coincided with installation failures and system slowdowns — a reminder that even “preview” fixes can ripple into real-world friction for consumers and enterprises. Background Microsoft released KB5044384 as an...

Microsoft’s latest optional preview for Windows 11, KB5067036, has delivered a visible Start menu refresh and other small improvements — and, for a subset of users, a nagging regression that leaves Task Manager processes alive after you click the window Close (X) button, spawning multiple resident taskmgr.exe instances that quietly consume RAM and CPU until explicitly killed. Background Windows servicing windows often include optional, non‑security “preview” cumulative updates that blend...

Capcom’s Steam page quietly confirmed what many suspected: Resident Evil Requiem’s PC requirements are surprisingly modest for a modern AAA title, but there’s an uncompromising caveat — Windows 11 (64-bit) is mandatory. The store listing publishes a practical minimum and recommended hardware envelope that will let a broad swath of current gaming PCs run the game, while the OS gate effectively excludes unsupported Windows 10 machines unless owners upgrade or enroll in short-term extended...

Microsoft's timing could not have been worse: as Windows 10 reached its end-of-support horizon, the company's most familiar consumer upgrade utility — the Media Creation Tool — began failing for many Windows 10 users, closing silently without error and leaving upgrade and recovery workflows stranded. Microsoft has since pushed a remediation: the Media Creation Tool was updated on October 28, 2025 and a preview cumulative update (KB5067036) addresses the related Arm64 compatibility regression...

Samsung’s mobile browser has returned to Windows as a deliberately staged beta, bringing bookmarks, open tabs, and Galaxy AI-powered browsing tools to PCs — but the rollout is limited, some features are still staged, and careful verification is essential before you install it on primary machines. Background Samsung Internet has been a staple browser on Galaxy phones for more than a decade, known for a privacy-forward design, extension support, and tight integration with Samsung services. The...

Microsoft’s latest push to make AI a first-class tool for everyday business users landed this week with the addition of App Builder and Workflows agents inside Microsoft 365 Copilot — features that promise to let employees create working apps and automate cross‑app processes “in minutes” using plain language inside the Copilot chat experience. Delivered as part of the Copilot “Frontier” preview, these new agents pair a lightweight Copilot Studio authoring surface with Microsoft 365 data and...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud experienced a high‑visibility global outage beginning on October 29, 2025 that briefly knocked important consumer and enterprise services offline — including Microsoft 365, Xbox Live, Minecraft authentication and a number of high‑profile customer sites — after an inadvertent configuration change in the Azure Front Door (AFD) edge fabric introduced DNS and routing failures; Microsoft deployed a rollback and said the AFD service was operating above 98% availability as...

Microsoft is doubling down on the physical work of AI—ramping GPU capacity, signing multi‑billion dollar infrastructure deals, and building “AI‑first” datacenters—because analysts now expect that Azure’s revenue growth will re‑accelerate as those investments come online. Background Microsoft’s recent quarters have shown a clear pattern: explosive demand for AI‑driven workloads is outpacing available GPU‑dense capacity, prompting heavy capital expenditures, third‑party capacity deals, and...

The internet flickered and, for millions of users and hundreds of thousands of downstream services, it briefly went dark — first with a major AWS incident in mid‑October and then with a widespread Microsoft Azure outage on October 29 that was traced to a misapplied configuration change in Azure Front Door. Background The modern public internet increasingly runs on a small number of massive cloud platforms known as hyperscalers. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud...