Microsoft

Microsoft had stopped offering 24H2 to gamers with certain Ubisoft games installed, but now it will for Avatar: Frontlines of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, Microsoft writes in an update spotted by XDA Developers.

Windows Update will offer the download within 48 hours of applying a “temporary” patch, the company says. Assassin’s Creed games like Valhalla remain affected and would preclude your system, though.

A corporation joining Bluesky isn’t normally news, but Microsoft managed to do it in style this week. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the Windows XP Bliss wallpaper and a pun about blue skies, but if you look a little closer you’ll see Microsoft even backdated this post to its founding date of April 4th, 1975 using Bluesky’s AT Protocol. That’s the kind of nerdery that Bluesky users appreciate.

Microsoft is stepping up its Copilot Plus PC marketing today with a new ad for the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World movie. The 60-second spot features Danny Ramirez’s Joaquin Torres (Falcon) using a Surface Laptop 7 with Paint’s Cocreator AI mode to generate images. Microsoft has been running similar TV ads in recent weeks, claiming that its Qualcomm-powered laptops are somehow “the fastest... Windows PCs ever.”

I’m at The New York Times DealBook Summit, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently got off stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Some highlights:

- He doesn’t think Elon Musk will wield his new political power against business rivals: “It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself.”

- His disagreement with my view that OpenAI and Microsoft are in the process of breaking up: “I don’t think we’re disentangling.”

You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

This year Microsoft highlights your preferred gaming platform, total time played, and number of games played for its Xbox year in review. You can see how you stack up against other players, how much gamerscore you earned in 2024, and a list of your favorite games. There’s even a little shout-out from Xbox chief Phil Spencer, too.

The minimum PC specs for Indiana Jones mean you’ll need at least a 10700K CPU, RTX 2060 Super, and 120GB of SSD storage. Interestingly, Bethesda says GPU hardware ray tracing is “required” at minimum, so that rules out Nvidia’s older 10 series of cards. Bethesda also lists the i7-13900K and Ryzen 7 7900X, both of which don’t exist. We’ve asked Bethesda to clarify the typos here.

A UK lawsuit is seeking more than £1 billion ($1.2 billion) in compensation for what is being described as overcharges to use alternative cloud solutions. Microsoft allegedly makes it difficult and expensive to use Windows Server and Office products on non-Azure cloud infrastructure. Google filed a similar complaint with the EU recently and the FTC is also looking into Microsoft’s cloud licensing.

The outage affecting services like Exchange Online, Teams, and Outlook email hasn't been resolved despite starting early Monday morning. Now Microsoft's status page is forecasting a resolution "within 3 hours."

The Microsoft 365 status reports it’s “started to deploy a fix,” after noting issues overnight affecting Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams. Its status page mentioned there have been problems for some while accessing Outlook via the web or desktop, Sharepoint, and Universal Print.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has had a pretty rough launch, and now Microsoft has put out a hotfix aimed at addressing some of the performance and stability issues. “We will continue to investigate any issues and keep the community informed,” says game lead Jorg Neumann.

Microsoft’s head of Experiences & Devices, Rajesh Jha, just quietly announced a strange change to Microsoft 365 at Ignite today.

“Over the next couple of months we will change the Microsoft 365 app icon to the new Microsoft 365 Copilot icon,” says Jha. The new icon is identical to the Copilot one, instead of the blue and purple Microsoft 365 icon that’s used right now. Microsoft has been struggling with its Copilot branding recently.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launches on Xbox and PC today, and in addition to hot air balloons and firefighting planes, Joby Aviation has announced that its electric air taxi will also be available to fly in the game.

Joby worked with the game’s developers to digitally recreate its air taxi, including its interior, exterior, and unique vertical take-off capabilities.