GoKawiil
Tech News
Microsoft now primarily sells Office through its Microsoft 365 subscription rather than one-time purchases, with a standalone license available for $180 but limited to one PC. The Family subscription plan includes 1TB of cloud storage per user, but Microsoft has added AI features to its plans and raised prices without an option to opt out of AI tools.
Microsoft has revealed a major redesign of its business-facing Copilot tools, which CEO Satya Nadella describes as a 'new OS for work.' The suite includes Home, which can draft and edit Office files; Code, which builds apps from natural-language prompts using GitHub Copilot's engine; and Autopilot, a rebrand of Scout that autonomously handles tasks like scheduling and follow-ups across Teams, Outlook and other apps. Home and Code enter Microsoft's Frontier testing program in coming weeks, with Autopilot reaching private preview by month's end.
Microsoft launched an updated Copilot app on Friday that combines coding and productivity features previously split between 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot, organized into Cowork, Code and Autopilot components. Instead of the standard $30-per-user monthly subscription, customers will pay based on usage, echoing pricing models used by rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. Fewer than 7% of Microsoft's 450 million-plus commercial Office 365 seats currently hold Copilot AI licenses.
On September 2, Microsoft's Safe Links feature within Defender for Office 365 began misidentifying Google Search URLs shared in emails and Teams messages as malicious, blocking users from opening them. The outage, tracked internally as MO1465962, lasted about seven and a half hours before Microsoft resolved the faulty detection logic, though some users may have experienced lingering effects.
Microsoft confirmed its Defender for Office 365 Safe Links feature is incorrectly flagging legitimate Google search URLs as malicious, showing users 'not safe' warnings when they try to click them. The company said the problem stems from an inaccurate security classification and is generating false alerts for IT admins in Microsoft Sentinel and the Defender portal. Pasting the blocked links directly into a browser does not bypass the warning.
Microsoft ended free premium Office licenses for smaller nonprofits worldwide, and many organizations discovered their stored data—including Word, Excel, and OneDrive files—had been permanently deleted without adequate warning. Ronald Khosla, who runs the environmental venture fund Canopy, says he was told by Microsoft support that his data could be recovered, only to later learn it was gone for good.