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Microsoft has rejected claims that it ordered Azure division leaders to cut expenses by 20% to help fund rising AI spending. A company spokesperson called the reports 'inaccurate and careless' and said no such directive was issued.
Microsoft and Japan's National Police Agency disrupted a cybercrime operation centered on a marketplace called YAM Store and two phishing kits, CoGUI and Iron Man. Since January 2026, the network had reportedly sent over one billion malicious messages to more than 75,000 organizations in 150+ countries, including 750 million aimed at Microsoft customers, generating tens of millions of dollars for operators.
A Hacker News poster warns that domains using the third.level.name format are scheduled to be permanently expunged next year, and asks others how they are migrating away. The poster describes being stuck with Azure, saying admin emails on the account cannot be changed and that Microsoft support has been unable to help.
The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has cancelled its planned rollout of Microsoft 365 on the public cloud after about 5,000 employees had already migrated. The government paused the project in July following a June recommendation from the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment, and State Secretary Eelco Eerenberg has now outlined a replacement plan moving mail and calendar functions on-premises in 2027, followed by European open-source tools for storage and collaboration in 2027-2028.
Microsoft has officially unveiled the Xbox Nano, a smaller, lighter controller aimed at younger players or those with smaller hands who want portable gameplay. Priced at $49.99, it measures just over five inches, includes a rechargeable battery, Xbox Wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, and a customizable Action Button. It's available for pre-order now and ships in November.
Microsoft researchers published a study in Nature describing a machine learning system that corrects bias in existing physics-based and AI weather models, improving forecast accuracy two to six weeks ahead. The tool, now available as open-source software, can run on standard CPUs rather than requiring supercomputers or powerful GPUs.
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft each announced new AI-focused hardware within the past week, including Apple's wall-mountable HomeView device with an upgraded Siri assistant and a Microsoft Windows laptop built around an Nvidia AI chip starting at $2,599. The companies are pushing faster on-device AI chips and smarter assistants across laptops, tablets, phones and smart home devices ahead of the holiday shopping season.
ArtCraft, the startup behind free Adobe Creative Cloud alternatives built using Anthropic's Claude AI, has released open-source clones of Microsoft Office apps called GridCraft, DeckCraft and WordCraft. The tools are available as free downloads on ArtCraft's website, with optional paid AI image and video generation credits powered by Google's Nano Banana Pro.
Microsoft released cumulative updates KB5127648 and KB5127646 fixing a bug that broke Always On VPN connections on Windows 11 24H2 and later systems after installing September 2026 security updates. The issue affected devices using automatic protocol selection between IKEv2 and SSTP, causing connections to hang or fail with a port-in-use error when an initial attempt didn't succeed.
Microsoft and Japan's National Police Agency disrupted a cybercrime ecosystem that sent over a billion phishing messages to more than 75,000 organizations in 150 countries, including over 750 million targeting Microsoft customers this year. The investigation traced the activity to a marketplace called YAM Store, linked to phishing kits CoGUI, Haozi and Iron Man System, which sold compromised Microsoft and Google accounts and hijacked domains to impersonate real organizations.
Microsoft says that after installing the KB5124010 preview update or later, Remote Desktop connections can fail with error 0xC000000D on Windows 11 24H2, 25H2, 26H1 and 26H2 devices. The failures occur when the Administrator protection security feature is enabled, which affects enterprise-managed Remote Desktop host machines in particular. Microsoft has offered a temporary workaround—disabling Administrator protection via Intune or Group Policy—while it develops a permanent fix.
Microsoft released updates addressing more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities across Windows and other software, far exceeding September's previous record of about 1,000 fixes. One flaw, CVE-2026-96951, a Windows Shell security feature bypass, is already being exploited in the wild, while another, CVE-2026-108398 in the .NET Framework, was publicly disclosed before patching though not yet seen exploited. At least 78 of the fixes are rated critical, mostly allowing remote code execution.