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A high‑impact Microsoft Azure outage on October 29, 2025, knocked large swathes of internet services offline for hours — from Microsoft’s own productivity suite and gaming ecosystem to major airline check‑in systems and retail storefronts — after an inadvertent configuration change to Azure Front Door caused DNS and routing failures that propagated across Microsoft’s global edge. Background / Overview The visible fault began at roughly 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, when external monitoring...

Samsung’s long-running mobile browser is finally arriving on Windows desktops: a region‑gated beta of the Chromium‑based Samsung Internet for PC began rolling out on October 30, 2025, offering cross‑device sync with Galaxy phones, built‑in Galaxy AI features such as Browsing Assist, and a privacy‑forward toolkit that includes Smart Anti‑Tracking and a live Privacy Dashboard. Background / Overview For more than a decade Samsung Internet has been a mobile‑first browser bundled with Galaxy...

Microsoft and Meta have quietly turned the Quest 3 into a bona fide Windows workstation — one you can don and carry anywhere — by rolling out Windows 11’s Mixed Reality Link to the Quest 3 and Quest 3S, bringing an Apple Vision Pro–style virtual desktop experience to a far more affordable headset ecosystem. Background Microsoft first introduced the idea of streaming a full Windows 11 desktop into a mixed‑reality headset as a preview feature in late 2024. That preview has now moved into a...

I started using Windows File Explorer the way most people do—save here, download there, hope I remember where—and then discovered six deceptively simple tricks that instantly cut the time I waste on hunting and moving files; those same tips were the basis of a recent MakeUseOf guide you may have seen, and they’re worth a closer, verified look. Background / Overview File organization is one of those productivity problems that appears trivial until it becomes the time-sink of your week...

Windows can and will reopen apps you didn’t explicitly ask to run after a restart — and a single Settings toggle fixes it quickly. Overview Windows includes a feature called Restart apps (shown in Settings as Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in) that tries to restore the apps you had open when you shut down, sign out, or restart. It’s intended to preserve your workflow, but in practice it can reopen unwanted programs, slow sign‑in, and create a...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot expansion folds a risky but practical idea into a familiar Windows toolset: give the AI its own temporary computer to browse, test code, and interact with credentialed services — inside a sealed sandbox that shows you what it’s doing while preventing that work from touching your primary PC. Background Microsoft recently pushed Researcher — one of the new “deep reasoning” agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot — into a mode that can actually operate a computer on your...

NVIDIA Run:ai is now broadly positioned as a turnkey orchestration layer for cloud and hybrid AI on Microsoft Azure, promising to squeeze more performance from GPU fleets while adding governance, quota controls, and workload-aware scheduling that enterprises need to move from experimentation to production. Background Kubernetes changed how teams package and deploy workloads, but it was not designed with GPU-intensive AI workflows in mind. Native Kubernetes scheduling treats GPUs as coarse...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric fractured in plain sight on October 29, when an inadvertent tenant configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) triggered a cascade of DNS, routing and authentication failures that left Microsoft 365, the Azure Portal, Xbox/Minecraft services and thousands of customer web properties intermittently or wholly unreachable for hours — forcing a global rollback, emergency mitigations and renewed questions about cloud concentration and operational safety. Background /...

Microsoft engineers have rolled out fixes and reported progressive recovery after a widespread Azure outage on October 29 that disrupted Microsoft 365, Xbox, Minecraft and a raft of third‑party sites and business systems — an incident Microsoft traced to an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door (AFD) that produced DNS and routing failures at the global edge. Background / Overview Azure is one of the world’s largest public clouds, and Azure Front Door (AFD) is Microsoft’s...

Cisco Talos’ Halloween-themed roundup lands like a reminder: the calendar has turned, Windows 10’s free mainstream support is over, critical infrastructure bugs keep surfacing, and defenders must choose whether to treat users to smooth migrations or get tricked by inertia and exposure. The Talos piece stitches three urgent threads together — Windows 10 End of Support and the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) caveats, a blistering pace of new CVEs and Known Exploited Vulnerabilities...

Microsoft and Meta have quietly made it possible to use a Meta Quest headset as a multi‑monitor extension for a Windows 11 PC without third‑party apps, and the result is a surprisingly practical, if still preview‑grade, way to create a large virtual workspace. Overview Mixed Reality Link is a Microsoft‑developed Windows 11 app that streams your desktop into a paired Meta Quest 3 or Quest 3S headset, letting you position one to three high‑resolution virtual monitors in front of you. The setup...

Microsoft and community tools have finally turned the long-standing dream of "iMessage on Windows" from fantasy into a set of practical — if imperfect — options: built‑in Windows 11 integration via Phone Link (Start menu integration), OEM solutions such as Intel Unison, and self‑hosted or proxy relays like BlueBubbles and AirMessage. Each approach solves part of the problem — keyboard, larger display, and drag‑and‑drop file sharing — but none gives Windows users a fully native...

Samsung has pushed its long-running mobile web browser onto the Windows desktop with a region‑gated beta that promises cross‑device continuity, built‑in Galaxy AI browsing helpers, and a privacy‑forward feature set — a move that shifts Samsung Internet from a mobile exclusive into a direct competitor in the Windows browser arena. Background Samsung Internet debuted on Android more than a decade ago as a default browser on Galaxy phones and gradually built a reputation for robust privacy...

Intel has quietly closed a critical compatibility loop: the company’s latest wireless driver packages — Intel Wireless Wi‑Fi and Intel Wireless Bluetooth version 23.170.0 — are now formally validated to support Microsoft Windows 11, version 25H2, and the Wi‑Fi package explicitly includes client‑side support for Intel’s Wi‑Fi 7 adapters. Background / Overview Windows 11 version 25H2 arrived as a lightweight enablement package (an eKB) that flips features already present in the servicing...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a substantial redesign of the Windows 11 Start menu through the October non‑security preview update (KB5067036), delivering a single, scrollable Start surface, new app‑browsing modes, tighter Phone Link integration, and a set of taskbar and File Explorer refinements that aim to make launching apps and managing cross‑device activity faster and less cluttered. Background / Overview Windows' Start menu has been central to desktop navigation for decades, and the...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a substantial refresh of the Windows 11 Start menu as part of the optional October 28, 2025 preview update (KB5067036), introducing a single, vertically scrollable Start surface, multiple "All apps" view modes, tighter Phone Link integration, and a handful of taskbar and File Explorer refinements that together aim to restore discoverability and customization to the launcher while remaining gated behind Microsoft’s staged rollout model. Background / Overview...

YouTube’s removal of several Windows 11 how‑tos — including a pair of videos from the CyberCPU Tech channel that showed users how to create a local account during setup and how to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware — has exposed a fault line between platform moderation at scale and technical how‑to culture, with consequences for creators, privacy‑minded users, and anyone who maintains older PCs. The videos were taken down under YouTube’s “harmful or dangerous” policy language, and...

Microsoft Azure suffered a widespread, high‑impact outage on October 29 that knocked Microsoft 365, Xbox/Minecraft, the Azure Portal and thousands of customer sites offline or into intermittent failure for several hours while engineers rolled back an inadvertent Azure Front Door (AFD) configuration change and worked through a cautious, phased recovery. Background / Overview Microsoft Azure operates a global edge and application‑delivery fabric called Azure Front Door (AFD) that performs TLS...

Microsoft’s latest Azure outage — coming less than two weeks after a major AWS disruption — exposed a fragile dependency at the heart of modern customer service: when the edge goes dark, millions of customer interactions stop working in minutes. Overview The outage began in the late afternoon UTC hours on October 29 and rippled through global systems that rely on Azure’s edge routing and communications stack. Microsoft’s public incident updates pointed to a problem in Azure Front Door (AFD)...

Microsoft’s staged recovery from a major Azure outage is under way after an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door left services, consumer apps and enterprise systems intermittently unavailable across multiple regions, and customers are being advised to expect a bumpy restoration as traffic is rebalanced and edge capacity is recovered. Background / Overview On October 29, 2025, Microsoft acknowledged a large-scale disruption originating in Azure Front Door (AFD), its global...