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Alaska Airlines customers experienced disruptions to online check‑in and booking after a widespread Microsoft Azure outage took down parts of the carrier’s website and mobile app on October 29, 2025, a failure that underscores the operational and reputational risks airlines face when core customer‑facing systems sit on third‑party cloud platforms. Background Alaska Airlines — which has been rebuilding and consolidating its IT estate following its acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines and several...

Microsoft’s Azure outage on October 29 briefly knocked Alaska Airlines’ website and mobile app offline, compounding a week of severe technology problems for the carrier and underscoring how edge‑level cloud failures can produce immediate, real‑world disruption for airlines and their customers. Background Alaska Airlines announced that several customer‑facing services are hosted on Microsoft Azure and that the airline’s website and mobile app experienced interruptions during a global...

Samsung is bringing its full-featured Android browser to Windows for the first time as a staged beta, promising cross-device continuity with Galaxy phones, built‑in Galaxy AI browsing assists, and a privacy-forward feature set — but the path from mobile to desktop contains clear technical and governance hurdles that users and administrators should evaluate before switching fleets of machines. Background Samsung Internet has long been an underrated but powerful mobile browser on Android...

A guitarist performs on a neon-lit city street under a swirling starry night sky.

Ooblets’ announcement for Xbox One and Windows 10 landed as an immediately charming — and oddly ambitious — piece of news: a tiny two‑person studio promising a cozy, creature‑collecting farming sim with full Xbox Play Anywhere and Cross Play support, published under the Double Fine Presents banner and originally aiming for a 2018 release. The game’s lead developer, Rebecca Cordingley of Glumberland, described Ooblets as “Pokémon smushed into Harvest Moon and stirred up with some Animal...

If you want to install Windows 11 on older hardware without first buying a new PC, the quickest, most reliable community method today is to build a Rufus USB installer that relaxes Windows 11’s setup checks — it automates the same unattended and registry tricks enthusiasts have used for years and wraps them in a friendly UI so you can bypass TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and Microsoft account enforcement when necessary. Overview Windows 11 introduced stricter hardware requirements than Windows 10 —...

Dell overhauled its naming, packed AI into PC marketing, and folded long-standing lines like XPS and Latitude into three simple families — but the result still leaves buyers asking the same questions: which Dell laptop is actually right for me? This deep-dive unpacks the 2025 rebrand, decodes the new Dell, Dell Plus, Dell Premium, Dell Pro, Dell Pro Max and Alienware families, verifies the technical claims behind "AI" and "Copilot+ PCs," and gives a practical decision framework so you can...

Raycast’s keyboard-first launcher has quietly reshaped how many power users open apps, manage clipboards and trigger quick actions — and for a growing number of Windows users the Start menu is no longer the center of their workflow. Background Windows’ Start menu has long been the front door to applications, settings and system commands. Since Windows 11’s redesign, many users have complained about discoverability, responsiveness and lack of flexibility; those frustrations have created a...

Four years after Windows 11 first rearranged a familiar piece of Windows UI, Microsoft has quietly — and finally — fixed what a lot of users called the Start menu's most annoying friction: the need to click a separate “All” page to see every installed app. The Start menu now exposes a true “All apps” experience on the main page with three browsing modes — Category, Grid, and List — and gives you the option to collapse the Recommended area entirely so your full app list sits immediately under...

Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) has publicly exposed an active, server‑focused cyberespionage campaign — tracked as PassiveNeuron — that has compromised Internet‑facing Windows Server systems in government, financial and industrial environments across Asia, Africa and Latin America, using bespoke implants alongside commodity tools to establish resilient, low‑noise footholds from December 2024 through at least August 2025. Background Kaspersky first documented the...

A large, synchronous failure inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud knocked customer-facing services offline across Europe and beyond on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, forcing airports, airlines, banks and gaming platforms to fall back to manual processes while engineers rolled back an unintended configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) and restored routing. Microsoft confirmed the incident as an AFD routing and DNS control-plane problem and began deploying a “last known good” configuration...

Microsoft’s latest quarterly report produced a familiar paradox for investors: record-breaking top-line growth driven by an accelerating cloud and AI business, paired with an unprecedented spike in capital spending that immediately heightened questions about sustainability, margins, and the long-term return on Microsoft’s AI factory. Background Microsoft’s October announcement confirmed what the market has been digesting all year — cloud demand fueled by enterprise AI initiatives is surging...

A widespread Microsoft Azure outage today disrupted online check-in, mobile apps, and other key digital services for Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines, forcing travelers to queue at airports and complicating an already fragile recovery from a separate IT failure earlier this month. The outage—rooted in Microsoft’s Azure Front Door network and described by Microsoft as the result of an inadvertent configuration change—rippled through client systems worldwide and underscored how a single...

Alaska Airlines’ public-facing systems went dark on October 29 when a sweeping Microsoft Azure outage—traced by Microsoft to an inadvertent configuration change in its Azure Front Door service—left the carrier’s website and mobile app unavailable and forced airport staff to revert to manual check‑in and boarding workflows, compounding operational pain for the airline less than a week after a separate IT failure forced more than 400 flight cancellations and disrupted roughly 49,000...

Microsoft Azure suffered a widespread, multi-region outage on October 29, 2025, taking down a swath of Microsoft customer-facing services — from Microsoft 365 and Copilot to Xbox Live and Minecraft — and triggering recovery procedures that centered on rolling back Azure Front Door (AFD) to a previously stable configuration while blocking further changes until nodes were restored and traffic safely rebalanced. Background / Overview Cloud platforms have long promised scale, resilience, and an...

A sweeping Microsoft Azure outage on the morning of October 29 knocked numerous customer‑facing services offline and interrupted airline operations worldwide, briefly taking down Alaska Airlines’ and Hawaiian Airlines’ websites and mobile apps, contributing to widespread check‑in failures and renewed scrutiny of cloud concentration risks across the aviation industry. Microsoft says the fault was triggered by an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door — the company’s global edge...

Samsung’s mobile browser is officially making a renewed push onto Windows — this time as a beta with deeper Galaxy integration, AI-powered browsing assist, and cross-device syncing — but the route to a stable, fully featured PC release is still cautious and phased, and users should prepare for regional rollouts, limited features in early builds, and privacy trade-offs tied to cloud-powered AI services. Background Samsung Internet has been a major alternative browser on Galaxy phones for...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a redesigned Start menu for Windows 11 via the optional preview update KB5067036, and enthusiasts who don’t want to wait for Microsoft’s staged activation can manually reveal the new interface today using the community utility ViVeTool — provided their PC already has the servicing binaries installed and they accept the small but real risks of flipping unsupported feature flags. Overview Microsoft packaged the refreshed Start experience in the October/November...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone suffered a high‑visibility failure on October 29, 2025, when a configuration error in Azure’s global edge fabric left Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, Xbox services and thousands of customer sites intermittently or wholly unreachable for hours, forcing a company‑wide rollback and emergency traffic re‑routing while millions of users and enterprises experienced disrupted productivity and gaming sessions. Background / Overview The outage centered on Azure Front Door...

HMRC has begun what officials are calling the largest Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout in UK government — a phased deployment that starts with 32,000 licences this year and is planned to grow to 50,000 by 2026, accompanied by mandatory training, governance controls, and claims of multi‑million‑hour productivity gains. Background: what’s happening and why it matters HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has confirmed a major roll‑out of Microsoft 365 Copilot across its workforce, following a Whitehall...