Microsoft followed the outage on its Azure status webpage. Customers started reporting an error when trying to access some resources in Azure Active Directory. The error message read “AADSTS90033: A Transient error has occurred. Please try again.” By time the situation was resolved, 2 hours and 40 minutes had passed. According to the Microsoft Azure Active Directory team, the issue was caused by request traffic volume in the specific region....

According to a report in Reuters, Microsoft deeming TikTok to be a security risk broke the deal. ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming was upset by Redmond’s stance. Microsoft registered its interest in the company back in August. The interest came following President Trump’s decision to ban TikTok from the United States. An executive order signed last month stops ByteDance from handling any transactions in the United States. In fact, the company was meeting with ByteDance before Trump’s order, going as far as to sign a nonbinding agreement....

In a blog post to confirm the situation, Microsoft describes the potential threat in the following way: “The Microsoft Defender for IoT research team recently analyzed a cross-platform botnet that originates from malicious software downloads on Windows devices and succeeds in propagating to a variety of Linux-based devices. The botnet spreads by enumerating default credentials on internet-exposed Secure Shell (SSH)-enabled devices. Because IoT devices are commonly enabled for remote configuration with potentially insecure settings, these devices could be at risk to attacks like this botnet....

The test showed how SQL Server 2017 with scalable persistent memory could run queries more than five times faster than a fast SSD drive array, but at 50% the cost. Microsoft says this makes the service the world’s first enterprise-grade diskless database server. The company also debuted a tool called Microsoft SQL Operations Studio. With the features, developers and admins improve their database development and operations. SQL Operations Studio is available for dev’s working on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines....

The company is starting to test the new Xbox Home UI for Insiders this week. For everyone else, the UI will come to the Xbox consoles in 2023. Amongst the new UI ideas is a change to the design and layout to make accessing games and applications easier. Microsoft says it will conduct testing experiments through the Insider Program over the coming months before a wider rollout: “We know the Xbox homepage is where our gamers spend the most time, and it’s a space that’s very personal,” says Ivy Krislov, senior product manager lead of Xbox experiences....

This week, Microsoft offered an update on how it is handling Azure cloud capacity. As usual, the focus is on how the company manages demand for Microsoft Teams, which is based on Azure. Microsoft workplace collaboration/video communication platform has seen a significant rise in users during COVID-19. From a daily active userbase of around 20 million, Microsoft Teams usage has soared to over 75 million. Even that figure comes from Microsoft’s financial announcement last month....

Now that the Windows 10 Creators Update is out in the wild, Microsoft is showing how the feature update has improved battery efficiency in Edge. If you have been following the Microsoft Edge battery life story, you will know the company has issued videos pitting the browser against rivals. In its latest test, Microsoft conducted the same test across Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. The same hardware and conditions were used for all browsers....

When Chromium Edge launched and eventually replaced legacy Edge as the default browser on Windows 10, it did so with a slick new logo. This logo stretched across platforms suggesting a single browser experience based on the same underpinning tech. That has not been the case with the mobile experience differing from the desktop. Microsoft is now working towards unifying the codebase to Microsoft Edge on Chromium, at least on Android....

The extension will now set users back $3 a month for continued usage. It’s not a hefty fee by any means, but it’s likely to put many off. The add-on’s main mission is to combat fake news, so limiting access feels somewhat counter-intuitive. That said, this development was largely inevitable. The company employs trained journalists, and that kind of help won’t come at all cheap. Admittedly, NewsGuard is introducing a number of new functionalities with its subscription, which include:...

Neal Browning, a 46-year-old Microsoft network engineer from Bothell, Washington joined a group of four healthy volunteers for the study. During the trial they will test the RNA COVID-19 vaccine that has been developed by NIH and biotech company Moderna Inc. Browning says he is just doing his part to help combat the spread of COVID-19. “Every parent wants their children to look up to them,” but “it’s other people, too....

By using remote back access attacks against Microsoft Exchange Server, threat actors can access email accounts. 30,000 organizations have already been impacted by the vulnerability. All the critical vulnerabilities are found in Exchange Server 2019, 2016, and 2013. Only Exchange Online has escaped the flaw. The vulnerabilities are as follows: CVE-2021-26855: CVSS 9.1 CVE-2021-26857: CVSS 7.8 CVE-2021-26858: CVSS 7.8 CVE-2021-27065: CVSS 7.8 Following the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) issuing a warning on Saturday, the Biden administration is also getting involved....

In terms of the region expansion, Azure Kubernetes Service is now available in Australia East, UK South, West US, West US 2, and North Europe. Through this expansion, AKS is now available in ten regions and on three continents. Microsoft talked up the expansion and revealed ten more regions will be added in the coming months: “With AKS in all these regions, users from around the world, or with applications that span the world, can deploy and manage their production Kubernetes applications with the confidence that Azure’s engineers are providing constant monitoring, operations, and support for our customers’ fully managed Kubernetes clusters....

After a year of work, and a Windows release, the team has some clarity. In a developer series, Microsoft’s Aaron Gustafson explains his company’s interest in PWAs. For the unfamiliar, a PWA is a regular web page that can be used like a traditional or mobile application. They load like a regular page but can offer things like offline support, launching from the home screen, and push notifications. The UWP Crossover However, with UWP apps already offering such functionality, the use case on PC isn’t clear-cut....

As part of the December 2022 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft is deploying a Known Issue Rollback (KIR) for each of the affected Windows systems: KB5021255 on Windows 11 22H2 and KB5021234 on Windows 11 21H2 KB5021233 for Windows 10 And KB5021249 for Windows Server Announcement Microsoft has also updated its Windows Health Dashboard to reflect the changes made to fix the Direct Access connection issue: “Resolution: This issue was resolved in updates released December 13, 2022 ( KB5021233) and later....

For the unfamiliar, Flipgrid, formerly known as Vikdu, was acquired by Microsoft in 2018. Its goal is to craft a platform to accommodate both teachers and students in their learning process. As such, it looks to bring innovative new ways to learn to its customers. One such feature announced during the live event is an augmented reality system designed to bring student voices to the physical world. “Teachers and students can now create and print new FlipgridAR stickers for any response to place Flipgrid videos in augmented reality on everything, ‘stick’ student voice everywhere with FlipgridAR stickers, and use existing Flipgrid QR codes in schools around the world as they now work automatically with FlipgridAR,” explained Microsoft in a statement....

Speaking to The Information, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of retail and consumer goods, Shelly Bransten said the company is exploring possibilities. “It’s something we’re looking at very seriously because our customers are asking us for it.” Bransten says she has “a lot of respect” for Shopify. It you are unfamiliar with Shopify, it is an online e-commerce platform that offers over 600,000 online retailers service “including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants....

With this latest update, Microsoft is expanding on a recent major overhaul of the Yammer experience on mobile. As mentioned, a new conversation mode is available that includes new threading architecture. Microsoft says this allows interesting and important conversations to be highlighted more efficiently. Furthermore, Yammer has a new bubble UI that organizes conversation replies and a new “Read more” option. Microsoft says the new card-based design allows users to focus on the most important conversations....

1 Fixes2 RemoteFX vGPU Disabled This is the company’s next major Windows 10 release, which will arrive later this year. Windows 10 20H2 is previewing in the Beta channel, which recently replaced the Fast Ring of the Windows Insider Program. It is worth noting Windows 10 20H2 is the new version name for what was one previewing as Windows 10 version 1909. Microsoft decided to start naming Windows versions for their date cycle instead of year and month....

The release of .NET Core 3 follows it moving to Release Candidate status a week ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the latest version of Microsoft’s open source framework, it has a sea of changes. For example, C# 8.0 and F# 4.7 are part of the .NET Core experience now, which .NET Standard has been bumped to version 2.1. Elsewhere, .NET Core 3 comes with support for Windows Desktop apps via WinForms....

Developed by Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Willow Garage, ROS allows improved performance in robotics hardware. The framework is maintained by Open Robotics. Microsoft’s ROS integration for Windows 10 IoT it built from the ground up to enhance open source development of robotics solutions. Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics, said of the introduction: “We’re excited to add Windows IoT as a supported platform for ROS. The ROS developer community can now take advantage of a wide array features in Windows IoT, including hardware-accelerated machine learning, computer vision and cloud capabilities such as Azure Cognitive Services....