Microsoft is offering a Voluntary Exit Offer to roughly 60,000 employees at vice president level and below across select teams in the US, Canada, India and the UK, according to Business Insider and Bloomberg reports. Workers in data centers, sales and marketing are excluded, and those who accept will reportedly get benefits similar to a standard severance package. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman described the offer in an internal note as giving employees 'a new choice' to leave with support.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-10-26
Microsoft is giving as many as 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India the option to take a voluntary exit package that includes financial support and career planning help, chief people officer Amy Coleman said in a staff memo. Eligible groups include AI experiences, Copilot, CoreAI, Windows and Devices, Xbox, finance, and HR, while marketing, commercial sales, security, and some other teams are excluded or only partially included.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-26
ASUS and Microsoft have released the ROG Xbox Ally X20, a higher-end version of last year's ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld. It keeps the same AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chip and 24GB of LPDDR5X memory, but adds an OLED display, TMR joysticks, an adjustable D-pad, and a transparent plastic shell, priced at $1,300.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-10-26
Microsoft has shipped emergency security updates for .NET 8, 9, and 10, plus .NET 11 Release Candidate 3, to fix a critical vulnerability dubbed Broccoli2Shell (CVE-2026-111497). Discovered by Imperva's Red Team, the bug is an out-of-bounds write in the Brotli decompression library that can let attackers crash apps, leak memory, or in some cases execute code remotely via crafted Brotli-compressed data.
bleepingcomputer.com
· 2026-10-26
Microsoft shipped a firmware update on October 22 for the Surface Laptop Ultra that addresses screen flickering, random restarts, and slow reboot times, along with unspecified additional bug fixes and performance improvements. Microsoft says users may need to manually restart their device to complete installation, and the update cannot be uninstalled once applied.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-26
Denmark's former Ministry of Digitization has reportedly ended a pilot program that had 38 employees using the open-source Collabora suite instead of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The trial, launched in 2025 by then-minister Caroline Stage to reduce reliance on American technology, wound down before February 2026, with staff citing formatting, blank page, and track-changes problems.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-26
A 38-person pilot at Denmark's digitalization ministry testing Collabora, an open-source office suite integrated with cBrain's F2 case-handling system, has ended without adoption. Internal records obtained by Ingeniøren show testers faced persistent formatting bugs, missing fonts, blank documents and printing errors, and no staff currently use the replacement software.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-26
Microsoft has released Scope, an open-source platform built on Kubernetes that lets development teams run repeatable experiments to see how AI coding agents interact with their SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and documentation. The tool is available under the MIT License and is designed to turn observed agent behavior into actionable fixes for product teams. Microsoft cites the Azure Cosmos DB team, which used Scope's evaluations to resolve 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-26
Microsoft released Microsoft-Decision-1 on October 9, 2026, a narrow AI model that scores a fixed set of answer options with probability values rather than generating open-ended text. Built on Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B, the model is available through Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter, and Microsoft lists routing, classification, prioritization and verification among its core use cases, including internal applications in incident response and scientific discovery.
shattered.io
· 2026-10-26
A new analysis argues that Chrome's reputation for excessive memory use is largely an internet meme rather than a data-backed fact, comparing it to similarly exaggerated claims about Microsoft Edge being slow. The piece acknowledges Chrome does use RAM as needed, but says this has not been a significant practical problem either in 2016 or in 2026.
engadget.com
· 2026-10-25
Several major public companies have told a crypto trading platform to stop offering tokenized versions of their shares without authorization. The companies named include Microsoft, McDonald's and Verizon, who pushed back against the practice of issuing blockchain-based tokens meant to track their stock prices.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-10-25
Microsoft's Windows XP went on sale at retailers 25 years ago today, backed by a $500 million marketing campaign. The launch event in New York featured Bill Gates and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with a free Sting concert in Bryant Park, though festivities were toned down following the September 11 attacks. The OS marked Microsoft's shift away from the MS-DOS-based Windows line toward the more stable Windows NT core for consumers.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-25
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