Featured content

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...

Microsoft’s cloud suffered a high‑visibility disruption on Wednesday afternoon UTC when an apparent configuration error in Azure Front Door — Microsoft’s global edge and content delivery fabric — knocked a broad swath of Azure‑fronted services offline, producing real‑world outages for airlines, healthcare portals, developer tooling, gaming services and internal Azure management surfaces. Microsoft moved quickly to block further Front Door changes, roll back to a “last known good”...

Microsoft has deployed a fix after a widespread outage in its Azure cloud platform that began on October 29, 2025, with the incident traced to an inadvertent configuration change in the Azure Front Door (AFD) edge fabric that caused DNS, routing and authentication failures across many Microsoft-first and customer-hosted services. The event left users unable to reach Microsoft 365 admin consoles, Office web apps, Xbox Live and Minecraft authentication flows and produced 502/504 gateway errors...

A widespread Microsoft Azure outage this morning disrupted core services across New Zealand — from commercial airlines to emergency services — after a global issue with Azure Front Door (AFD) produced latencies, timeouts and authentication failures that cascaded through Microsoft’s edge and identity planes. Multiple operators, including Air New Zealand, New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) and the Interislander ferry, reported degraded availability or service...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud suffered a major, global outage on October 29, 2025, knocking customers offline and disrupting widely used services — including Microsoft 365 (Office 365), Outlook, Teams, Xbox Live and Minecraft — after a configuration-related failure in Azure’s edge routing fabric produced widespread latencies, timeouts and authentication errors that cascaded through enterprises and public services worldwide. Background Cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure are the invisible...

Microsoft’s phased refresh of the Windows 11 Start menu is more than a cosmetic tweak — it’s a deliberate redesign that reframes how apps, files, and mobile content are discovered on the desktop, folding phone continuity directly into the primary launcher while giving users genuinely new layout options and personalization controls. Background Since Windows 11 debuted, the Start menu has been a lightning rod for feedback: praised for a cleaner look but criticized for limited density...

Microsoft’s AI boss Mustafa Suleyman drew a bright, public line this month: “We will never build a sex robot,” a statement that frames Microsoft’s Copilot roadmap as deliberately bounded while rivals — most notably OpenAI — move toward age‑gated, adult‑oriented experiences that include erotica for verified users beginning in December 2025. Background The consumer‑AI market has shifted from novelty chatbots to persistent, identity‑aware assistants that can remember users, act across apps and...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone stumbled in the afternoon UTC window on October 29, 2025, knocking a broad swath of first‑party services and thousands of customer sites offline as engineers raced to contain a failure traced to Azure Front Door and related DNS/routing behaviour. This outage left Microsoft 365 admins staring at blank blades, gamers unable to sign into Xbox and Minecraft, and a cascade of retail, travel and consumer sites showing 502/504 and timeout errors while incident trackers...

Microsoft’s emergency response to a critical Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) flaw has turned into a full‑blown incident response exercise for enterprise administrators: the vulnerability, tracked as CVE‑2025‑59287, is an unsafe deserialization defect in WSUS reporting/web services that allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as the WSUS process (typically SYSTEM). Microsoft issued out‑of‑band (OOB) cumulative updates on October 23–24, 2025 to remediate the defect, while...

Microsoft has quietly begun rolling out a non‑security update that smooths several annoyances in Windows Update and addresses a recurring installation failure — the notorious error 0x800f0983 — for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2, while also pushing emergency fixes for related October update breakages that left some recovery tools and local services impaired. Background Windows Update remains the single most visible way most users interact with the Windows servicing pipeline, but it is...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone faltered on October 29, 2025, when a configuration error in Azure Front Door — Microsoft’s global edge and routing fabric — precipitated a broad Microsoft Azure outage that knocked Xbox Live, Minecraft authentication, Microsoft 365 admin portals and a raft of customer websites offline for hours as engineers rolled back the offending config and rerouted traffic to healthy nodes. Background / Overview Azure Front Door (AFD) is a global, Layer‑7 edge service that...

Microsoft’s Azure cloud posted a startling 40% revenue gain in the July–September quarter, pushing the company’s overall quarterly revenue to $77.7 billion and beating Wall Street estimates — and the headline wins came on the very same day a widespread Azure outage disrupted services worldwide and exposed fresh operational and strategic risks for Microsoft’s AI-driven growth story. Background Microsoft’s latest quarterly results delivered a blunt contradiction: accelerating commercial demand...

Alaska Airlines’ website and mobile app went dark on October 29, 2025, after a sweeping Microsoft Azure outage — traced to a configuration error in Azure Front Door — left passengers unable to check in online, access boarding passes, or manage bookings while airport staff reverted to manual processes and the carrier’s shares slid amid mounting scrutiny of its IT resilience. Background Alaska Airlines has been modernizing its IT stack for years with a hybrid architecture that mixes...

The launch-day chaos that greeted The Outer Worlds 2 took an unexpected detour from design and balance debates to a very different kind of fragility: a Microsoft Azure outage that left Obsidian’s new RPG available on Steam and PlayStation 5, but temporarily impossible to buy or install for many Xbox users — including those expecting to play via Xbox Game Pass. The interruption is a reminder that even games built for modern, platform-wide launches remain tightly coupled to cloud...

Microsoft’s cloud fabric suffered a high‑impact interruption that knocked Azure‑fronted web services — including Office 365 admin portals, Xbox/Minecraft authentication, and numerous customer websites — partially offline as engineers traced the root cause to a DNS/routing failure in Azure Front Door and moved to roll back a recent configuration change. Background / Overview Azure Front Door (AFD) is Microsoft’s global, layer‑7 edge and application‑delivery fabric that provides DNS‑level...

Microsoft’s cloud backbone suffered a major outage on October 29, 2025, taking down large swaths of services across the company’s own product portfolio — including Microsoft 365, Xbox Live and Minecraft — and triggering cascading failures at airlines, retailers, banks and other businesses that rely on Azure infrastructure. Background / Overview The disruption began on October 29, 2025, when Azure customers worldwide started to see latencies, timeouts and failures tied to the Azure Front Door...

If your Windows 11 PC crashes or freezes, the first few minutes of triage matter more than you think—capturing clues quickly, avoiding needless hardware swaps, and following a measured sequence of checks will usually get you back to a stable system without panic. The four core actions covered here—consulting Event Viewer, reinstalling essential drivers (with special attention to GPU and audio), testing RAM, and checking drive health—are the fastest, highest‑value steps for isolating the most...

Joining an online meeting or starting a movie only to be met with silence, crackling, or robotic voices is a uniquely aggravating modern problem — and one that’s surprisingly common on Windows 11 PCs. The good news: most of these issues are fixable without special tools, and a methodical troubleshooting approach will restore clear sound in the majority of cases. The following in-depth guide summarizes a practical troubleshooting flow, explains why Windows 11 audio problems occur so often...

Windows 11’s October preview (KB5067036) is shipping attractive UI changes — a redesigned Start menu, colorful battery icons and fixes for Update & Shut Down — but an emerging, strange regression is putting one of the OS’s core utilities under a microscope: multiple reports show Task Manager’s close button failing to actually terminate the app, leaving behind duplicate taskmgr.exe processes that accumulate and can harm performance on some machines. Background / Overview Microsoft published...