It might not get the same kind of attention as Google and Apple, but Microsoft is still one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies operating today. It runs Azure, one of the biggest cloud computing services, and maintains Windows 11 and the whole Office suite of software. It also makes plenty of Surface hardware and has a whole slew of gaming products, including the Xbox Series X. But the company is ever expanding — building new hardware, acquiring new game studios, and making sure that even if Microsoft doesn't run your phone, it can touch plenty of the apps on it.
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The 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines
CrowdStrike’s faulty update has kicked off questions about how to avoid a similar tech disaster.
Bing’s AI redesign shoves the usual list of search results to the side
Microsoft Bing is trying a new layout that fills your search results page with AI-generated information.
Welcome to Notepad, a newsletter on Microsoft’s era-defining bets
Notepad will include analyses and scoops from a veteran Microsoft reporter.
Look, I know unsightly stickers on Windows laptops have been with us since long ago when “Intel Inside” was something people actually wanted boast about. But come on, HP.
That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.
[Overture Maps Foundation]
I recently wrote about using Windows XP on my iPad Pro and Verge commenter cindrBear helpfully pointed out that in 2001, Microsoft announced Tablet PC.
Like with Copilot Plus PCs, the Tablet PC initiative encouraged manufacturers to make hardware for specific features — in this case, a Windows XP edition for touchscreen tablets. Seeing it in action in this video, I’m clearly using the wrong version of XP.
CrowdStrike and Microsoft: all the latest news on the global IT outage
A global IT outage grounded flights and resulted in outages at the London Stock Exchange and other systems early Friday morning.
Another IRL Blue Screen of Death, as captured by one of our own at JFK, highlights the slow recovery from Friday’s crash affecting millions of Microsoft Windows machines.
FlightAware data showed more than 600 Delta flights canceled on Monday as of 7AM ET, reports Reuters. That’s reportedly about 16 percent of its total and among more than 5,000 flights Delta canceled since Friday.
That’s according to an update made last night to CrowdStrike’s statement on yesterday’s global outage,
Similar to the above-referenced query, a Dashboard is now available that displays Impacted channels and CIDs and Impacted Sensors. Depending on your subscriptions, it’s available in the Console menu at either:
• Next-GEN SIEM > Dashboard or;
• Investigate > Dashboards
• Named as: hosts_possibly_impacted_by_windows_crashes
In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:
As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.
We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.
Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.
CrowdStrike outage Blue Screen of Death photos from around the world
Photos of a world seeing blue due to the massive outage affecting Microsoft Windows systems on Friday.
A bad time to get hit with the Blue Screen of Death is probably when you’re preparing for a practice session ahead of the Hungarian GP, especially when the problem has been caused by a team sponsor. But the Mercedes F1 team’s trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, told reporters they were back up after updating affected PCs.
The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil. So, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.
The CrowdStrike outage is far from over, as IT admins scramble to fix systems that have been impacted worldwide. Microsoft says it’s “working closely with CrowdStrike” to help Windows customers get back online after CrowdStrike issued a faulty update that has impacted systems globally.
This timelapse of Delta, American Airlines, and United air traffic says it all.
The Verge senior editor Tom Warren can explain. Follow our story stream for all of the latest updates about this situation causing Blue Screen of Death errors on computers worldwide.
At least, according to the FCC.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers on the Today show and said that the company “knows what the issue is” that caused the global IT outage early Friday morning.
Thousands of flights have been grounded so far in the massive outage. Some businesses are trying to reboot and bring their systems back themselves.
I love a scheduled social media post right in the middle of a major PC outage. IT admins certainly aren’t enjoying the CrowdStrike 2024 PC era.
Frontier says that if your flight was impacted, you can request a refund. The Federal Aviation Administration had to ground Frontier flights, but that ground stop was lifted after 10PM ET.
Microsoft services had been subject to a few problems Thursday evening, that got even worse on Friday after a bad CloudStrike update.
Update: noted that issue is resolved.
Microsoft has added a new “Xbox 360 Blades” Dynamic Background for Xbox Series S / X owners. It’s a blast of nostalgia, just as Microsoft prepares to close the Xbox 360 digital store on July 29th. A bunch of games are discounted ahead of the store closure, and there are even Xbox 360 t-shirts, hoodies, and other gear available for a limited time.