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A Microsoft cloud outage knocked large swathes of Microsoft 365, Azure management consoles and even gaming services offline for hours, with users worldwide reporting failed sign‑ins, blank admin portal blades, intermittent 502/504 gateway errors and disrupted Minecraft and Xbox authentication — an incident tied to capacity loss in Azure Front Door (AFD) and a regional network misconfiguration that forced Microsoft engineers to restart infrastructure and rebalance traffic to healthy edge...

Microsoft services are not immune to interruption — and on October 29, 2025 a flurry of community posts and outage reports once again asked the same blunt question: Is Microsoft 365 down? and Is Microsoft Azure down? The DesignTAXI community threads raised the alarm, reporting user-facing failures and redirecting readers to outage trackers; those posts capture the immediate confusion and practical workarounds users tried while waiting for official updates. Background Microsoft 365 (the cloud...

Germany’s national cybersecurity agency has warned that an overwhelming majority of the country’s publicly reachable Exchange servers remain on unsupported software just after Microsoft ended mainstream updates for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 — a finding that raises immediate operational, regulatory, and security red flags for organisations across healthcare, education, public administration, and the private sector. Background What changed: end of support and a limited safety valve...

YouTube has quietly removed several Windows 11 tutorial videos that showed how to avoid Microsoft’s account and hardware checks, issuing takedown notices that cited the platform’s “harmful or dangerous” policy — a justification creators and many in the Windows community say is nonsensical for step‑by‑step technical guidance and strongly suggests algorithmic misclassification rather than a human moderation decision. Background Windows 11’s Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) and tightened hardware...

Microsoft’s “Copilot+ PC” push is no longer marketing fluff — it surfaces tangible, productivity‑first features that many Windows 11 users can try right now, and three in particular deserve immediate attention on Copilot+ hardware: Click to Do, Live Captions with translation, and Studio Effects. These features showcase the practical wins of on‑device AI and the Windows 11 Copilot integration while also illustrating the governance and hardware trade‑offs IT teams must manage. Background...

Clippy’s paperclip grin is back on the desktop — not as an official Microsoft resurrection, but as a DIY homage that runs entirely on your PC using local LLMs and the open-source LLM inference stack. What started as a nostalgic tinkering project has become a practical, privacy-conscious way to run lightweight assistants on Windows 11: an Electron-based wrapper that downloads compact models, chooses the most efficient inference backend (Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, or CPU), and speaks with the cheeky...

Microsoft has quietly corrected a frustrating hiccup that left some users unable to create Windows installation media on Arm-based machines: the Media Creation Tool failure tied to build 26100.6584 is listed as fixed in the October preview cumulative update KB5067036, which also bundles a broad set of feature previews and reliability improvements for Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2. Background What broke, when, and why it mattered In late September 2025 Microsoft shipped an updated...

Microsoft’s Copilot now has a face — a deliberately non‑human one — as the company rolls out Mico, an animated, color‑shifting avatar that appears in Copilot’s voice mode and is designed to make spoken interactions feel more natural, empathetic, and contextually aware. Mico is the most visible element of Microsoft’s broader Copilot Fall Release, a package of consumer‑facing updates that pairs the avatar with long‑term memory, shared group sessions, a Socratic tutoring mode called Learn Live...

Microsoft is pushing Copilot beyond chat and into the mechanics of work by adding two new conversational, no-code building blocks — App Builder and Workflows — to Microsoft 365 Copilot, plus a lightweight in-pane Copilot Studio that lets knowledge workers create apps, automations and agents from plain English and existing Microsoft 365 content. The rollout is initially limited to tenants in Microsoft’s Frontier preview program and is explicitly positioned as a fast, governed way for...

Dame Emma Thompson’s expletive-laden takedown of AI writing assistants on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert crystallized a frustration many writers and knowledge workers feel: an increasingly insistent, default-on AI that treats the act of finishing a sentence as an invitation to “improve” it. Her short, furious verdict — “intense irritation” followed by a string of blunt commands for the machine to “fuck off” — wasn’t just star-power theatre. It highlighted an important design and policy...

This week’s 404 Media podcast episode distilled three converging stories that matter to anyone who cares about where we get facts, how we keep Windows PCs secure, and what venture capital is quietly building to reshape the social web: Elon Musk’s new AI encyclopedia Grokipedia and the messy debut that followed, the practical and environmental fallout of Windows 10’s end-of-support and the daily pain of Windows Update, and a16z’s Speedrun accelerator — a program backing startups that automate...

If you play Minecraft Bedrock on a Windows 11 PC, keeping the game updated isn’t optional — it’s essential for cross‑play compatibility, security fixes, and access to new Marketplace content — and the update process is straightforward once you know where to look and what to do when the download stalls. Background / Overview Minecraft Bedrock on Windows ships in a few different packaging and delivery models (Microsoft Store / Xbox App installs, the Minecraft Launcher, and Game Pass...

Microsoft’s latest Insider preview quietly adds a small but practical reliability feature to Windows 11: after an unexpected restart or bugcheck, the operating system can now prompt you at sign‑in to schedule a quick RAM scan that runs automatically on the next reboot, using the built‑in Windows Memory Diagnostic. This “Proactive Memory Diagnostics” flow is rolling out to Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels as part of the KB5067109 preview packages (Dev build 26220.6982 and Beta build...

If your keyboard suddenly misbehaves – keys that repeat, type the wrong characters, or stop responding entirely – the built‑in Keyboard Troubleshooter in Windows 11 and Windows 10 is the fastest first step most users should try. It’s a lightweight diagnostic that checks configuration, drivers, and input services and will automatically apply simple fixes or point you to the next steps when deeper intervention is needed. The tool is easy to run from Settings in both operating systems, but it...

Intel's wireless stacks have quietly shifted under the hood again: a new wave of unified Intel wireless packages — covering both Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth — has been published in mid‑2025 and later refreshed through the summer and autumn, bringing explicit Windows 11 readiness, expanded support for the Intel Wi‑Fi 7 (BE2xx) family, and a set of Bluetooth functional updates that address pairing reliability and modern Bluetooth feature exposure. This update stream is notable because it ties...

Microsoft is adding a simple but pragmatic recovery step to Windows 11: after an unexpected restart caused by a bug check (commonly known as a BSOD), the operating system will offer to schedule a quick, on‑boot Windows Memory Diagnostic scan at the next reboot to look for RAM faults that may have caused the crash. Background Microsoft has been incrementally hardening Windows 11 with a broad set of reliability and security measures — from virtualization‑based protections like Memory Integrity...

Finding and fixing a docking station that won’t show up in Windows 11’s Device Manager is a small but essential skill for any modern laptop user — this feature guide lays out a clear, tested workflow to locate your dock, verify it’s recognized, update or reinstall drivers, and escalate safely to firmware and hardware checks when needed. Background Docking stations are a convenient way to expand a laptop’s ports, power, and display capabilities, but they also introduce extra layers of...

FlyOOBE’s latest release quietly changes the rules of engagement for technicians and power users who have been upgrading unsupported Windows 10 PCs to Windows 11: version 1.41 introduces an explicit, operator‑initiated way to skip the app’s CPU compatibility check by removing a single helper file — a small but consequential tweak that makes bypasses easier and more overt, while also spotlighting the persistent tradeoffs of running Windows 11 on hardware Microsoft considers unsupported...

The Snipping Tool built into Windows 11 now gives you quick, native ways to hide or remove personal information from screenshots — from a one‑click “Quick redact” that targets phone numbers and email addresses to a simple ballpoint‑pen scribble for everything else — plus built‑in OCR (Text Actions) that both finds text and lets you redact it before sharing. These additions make it far easier to prepare screenshots for public posting or sensitive conversations without leaving Windows, but...

Microsoft and Apple devices can now play together in a way that many Windows users with iPhones have wanted for years: you can answer calls, send and receive texts, and view phone notifications from Windows 11 using Microsoft’s Phone Link (and the Link to Windows iOS companion), while traditional USB-based backups and media sync remain available through Apple Devices or iTunes on Windows. This article explains how the connection works, verifies the technical requirements and limitations, and...