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Tech News
Microsoft has restructured its Xbox game studios, placing Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries), Rare and Age of Empires developer World's Edge under Activision's control. The move accompanies 268 additional layoffs, with the remaining Halo team reduced to a small community-support unit while Activision assembles a new team to lead the franchise's future.
British AI cloud provider Nscale, spun out of Arkon Energy two years ago, disclosed over $103 billion in contracts ahead of its NYSE listing, but roughly 85% of that value comes from just two customers: Microsoft and Anthropic. The Anthropic deal remains conditional on Nscale securing financing and hitting milestones the company itself calls stringent, with Anthropic free to cancel if targets are missed. Nscale is targeting a $35 billion valuation and hopes to raise $3 billion, despite posting a $1.02 billion net loss on $140.6 million in revenue for the first half of the year.
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, working with Health-ISAC, law enforcement, and SpyCloud, dismantled the infrastructure behind EvilTokens, a phishing-as-a-service platform that had compromised over 12,000 Microsoft accounts across more than 10,000 organizations. The UK's Metropolitan Police arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, suspected of administering the site, following raids in Canary Wharf and Nine Elms; both were released on bail.
Microsoft announced further restructuring at Xbox as part of cuts affecting roughly 3,200 employees, consolidating several studios and shifting development of Halo to a different team. Obsidian is moving from Xbox Game Studios to Bethesda to focus on Fallout, Microsoft's casual games like Minesweeper and Solitaire are shifting to King, and Playground and Turn 10 are merging into a single studio.
Microsoft is laying off roughly 268 employees across Halo Studios, other first-party teams, and Xbox Game Studios' central functions, according to a memo from chief content officer Matt Booty. Two prospective buyers for Ninja Theory fell through, so Microsoft is starting a consultation process on potentially shutting the Hellblade studio unless another buyer emerges. Undead Labs has completed its spinout to independence, while talks over Arkane's future continue under French labor law through year's end.
Microsoft is cutting 268 jobs across Halo Studios and other first-party teams as part of its ongoing Xbox restructuring, while also consolidating studios under fewer publishing umbrellas. Activision will now oversee World's Edge and Rare and take charge of developing the next Halo title through a newly formed team separate from Call of Duty, leaving a smaller crew at Halo Studios to support existing games. Other changes include Bethesda absorbing Obsidian, King merging with Microsoft Casual Games, and Playground Games combining with Turn 10 to focus on Forza and Fable.
Newly unsealed court documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions that undercut the companies' fair-use defense. Executives reportedly called AI chatbots an 'existential threat' to journalism and described the training process as one of the largest uses of copyrighted material without compensation, while data showed sharp declines in Times click-through traffic. The revelations have triggered a surge in options trading tied to the case's potential outcome.
Microsoft has reissued a reminder to enterprise IT admins that IE Mode, the legacy compatibility feature in Edge that runs sites using Internet Explorer's old Trident/MSHTML engine, will be discontinued by the end of 2029. The notice, sent via the Microsoft 365 admin center, reaffirms a 2021 commitment and asks organizations to begin planning now to migrate old applications away from IE dependencies.
Microsoft announced it is retiring its Microsoft 365 companion apps—Calendar, People, and Files—effective December 16, 2026, after which they will stop functioning and lose support. The company is telling IT administrators to uninstall the apps from managed devices before that date. The move comes roughly a year after Microsoft began automatically pushing these taskbar-integrated apps to Windows 11 enterprise devices running Microsoft 365 desktop clients.
A Hacker News user says that after turning off Siri in System Settings, Screen Time, and applying community debloat scripts, a 'Siri AI.app' process still appears running in Activity Monitor on macOS 27. The poster compares this persistent background activity to concerns previously raised about Microsoft's Recall feature, questioning whether Siri and Apple Intelligence services can truly be disabled.
Newegg is selling Microsoft's black wireless Xbox controller together with a $50 digital Xbox gift card for a combined $80. Since the controller alone usually costs $50 to $60, the deal effectively prices it around $30 once the gift card value is factored in.
Microsoft has released fixes for a bug that silently broke copy-and-paste, autofill, and formula dragging in Excel after installing this month's security updates, including KB5002914. Users of Excel 2016, Office LTSC 2019, 2021, and 2024 must manually install specific updates to resolve the issue, which had been widely reported on Reddit and Microsoft's Q&A forums.