Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming." "The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience. January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts. The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said.

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There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address -- which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list -- is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists. According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn't allowed)," she said. Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft's own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it's easy to miss.

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Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com -- a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party -- to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo Electric. The misconfiguration meant anyone attempting to set up an Outlook account using an example.com email address could have inadvertently sent test credentials to Sumitomo Electric's servers. Under RFC2606, example.com resolves only to IP addresses assigned to the Internet Assigned Names Authority. Microsoft confirmed it has "updated the service to no longer provide suggested server information for example.com" and said it is investigating. Security researcher Dan Tentler of Phobos Group noted the company appears to have simply removed the problematic endpoint rather than fixing the underlying routing -- "not found" errors now appear where the JSON responses previously occurred. Tinyapps.org, which noted the behavior earlier this month, said the misconfiguration had persisted for five years. Microsoft has not explained how Sumitomo Electric's domain entered its configuration. The incident follows 2024's revelation that a forgotten test account with admin privileges enabled Russia-state hackers to monitor Microsoft executives' email for two months.

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Mises à jour Windows : Microsoft a réussi à casser Notepad et l'outils de capture d'écran 😂
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Des nouvelles des mises à jour de Microslop Windows 11.
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Early Friday "there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET," reports Reuters. But that's down "from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector." Reuters points out the outage affected antivirus software Microsoft Defender and data governance software Microsoft Purview, while CRN notes it also impacted "a number of Microsoft 365 services" including Outlook and Exchange online: During the outage, Outlook users received a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email. Users did not have the ability to send and receive email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage, according to the vendor. Other issues that cropped up include an inability to send and receive subscription email through [analytics platform] Microsoft Fabric, collect message traces, search within SharePoint online and Microsoft OneDrive and create chats, meetings, teams, channels or add members in Microsoft Teams... As with past cloud outages with other vendors, even after Microsoft fixed the issues, recovery efforts by its users to return to a normal state took additional time... Microsoft confirmed in a post on X [Thursday] at 4:14 p.m. ET that it "restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state" but "further load balancing is required to mitigate impact...." The company reported "residual imbalances across the environment" at 7:02 p.m., "restored access to the affected services" and stable mail flow at 12:33 a.m. Jan. 23. At that time, Microsoft still saw a "small number of remaining affected services" without full service stability. The company declared impact from the event "resolved" at 1:29 p.m. Eastern. Microsoft sent out another X post at 8:20 a.m. asking users experiencing residual issues to try "clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation...." Microsoft said in an admin center update that [Thursday's] outage was "caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure." Furthermore, Microsoft noted that during "ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic" it introduced a "targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure." US itek's David Stinner said it appears that Microsoft did not have enough capacity on its backup system while doing maintenance on its main system. "It looks like the backup system was overloaded, and it brought the system down while they were still doing maintenance on the main system," he said. "That is why it took so many hours to get back up and running. If your primary system is down for maintenance and your backup system fails due to capacity issues, then it is going to take a while to get your primary system back up and running." "This was not Microsoft's first outage of 2026," the article notes, "with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday, a Copilot issue on Jan. 15 plus an Azure outage earlier in the month..."

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Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI's defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk's ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. "Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how Microsoft pursued, rebuffed, and backed OpenAI at various moments over the past decade, ultimately shaping the course of the lab that launched the generative AI era," reports GeekWire. "The latest round of documents, filed as exhibits in Musk's lawsuit, [...] show how Nadella and Microsoft's senior leadership team rally in a crisis, maneuver against rivals such as Google and Amazon, and talk about deals in private." Even though Microsoft didn't have a seat on the OpenAI board, text messages between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman following Altman's firing as CEO in Nov. 2023 (news of which sent Microsoft's stock plummeting), revealed in the latest filings, show just how influential Microsoft was. A day after Altman's firing, Nadella sent Altman a detailed message from Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and top lawyer, explaining that Microsoft had created a new subsidiary called Microsoft RAI (Responsible Artificial Intelligence) Inc. from scratch -- legal work done, papers ready to file as soon as the WA Secretary of State opened Monday morning -- and was ready to capitalize and operationalize it to "support Sam in whatever way is needed," including absorbing the OpenAI team at a calculated cost of roughly $25 billion. (Altman's reply: "kk"). Just days later, as he planned his return as CEO to the now-reeling-from-Microsoft-punches nonprofit, Altman joined Microsoft's Nadella, Smith, and CTO Kevin Scott in a text messaging thread in which the four vetted prospective board members to replace those who had ousted Altman. Later that night, OpenAI announced Altman's return with the newly constituted board. If you like stories with happy Microsoft endings, as part of an agreement clearing the way for OpenAI to restructure as a for-profit business, Microsoft in October received a 27% ownership stake in OpenAI worth approximately $135 billion and retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI.

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Encore les soucis des mises à jour Microsoft.
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JE.
VAIS.
DÉCAPITER.
LES.
DÉVELOPPEURS.
DE.
MICROSOFT.

Un collègue m'envoi un bout de code dans Teams (dans un bloc de code). J'utilise le bouton "copier" dans Teams, je colle dans dans un autre logiciel. Erreur de syntaxe.

Le message envoyé par le collègue, à l'écran, contient : '</U>','</span>'
Ce que j'obtiens dans le presse-papier : '</U>',''</span>

J'adore quand Microsoft *sabote* mon boulot. 😒
MÊME LE COPIER-COLLER, ILS NE SONT PLUS FOUTUS DE LE FAIRE CORRECTEMENT. 💩💩💩
Ça dépense des DIZAINES DE MILLIARDS de dollars dans l'IA, mais ça ne sait même plus faire ce qu'un Mac 128k de 1984 savait assurer sans faillir.
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Microsoft appears to be preparing an ad-supported tier for Xbox Cloud Gaming that would let players stream games they've purchased digitally without needing a Game Pass subscription, according to a Windows Central report citing sources familiar with the plans. Users last week began noticing a new message pop up while launching cloud games that referenced "1 hour of ad supported play time per session," though no such tier currently exists. The ad-supported option, expected to launch sometime this year, would specifically target the hundreds of games available for digital purchase through Xbox Cloud Gaming -- titles that currently require at least one tier of Game Pass to stream despite being owned outright by the player.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience." Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.

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The chief constable of one of Britain's largest police forces has admitted that Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant made a mistake in a football (soccer) intelligence report. From a report: The report, which led to Israeli football fans being banned from a match last year, included a nonexistent match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Copilot hallucinated the game and West Midlands Police included the error in its intelligence report without fact checking it. "On Friday afternoon I became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot [sic]," says Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands Police, in a letter to the Home Affairs Committee earlier this week. Guildford previously denied in December that the West Midlands Police had used AI to prepare the report, blaming "social media scraping" for the error.

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