The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating whether big cloud infrastructure companies make it hard for businesses to switch or use multiple providers, putting the U.K. cloud market in the regulatory crosshairs. A year ago, Ofcom announced it was starting a market study of the £7.5 billion U.K. cloud …

Microsoft’s restructured acquisition of Activision is being considered by the UK’s competition watchdog. In an update on its ongoing assessment today, it said the deal “makes important changes that substantially address the concerns it set out in relation to the original transaction earlier this year”. The Competition and Markets Authority …

While publishing a storage bucket of open-source training data on GitHub, Microsoft AI researchers accidentally exposed tens of terabytes of sensitive data, including private keys and passwords. Cloud security startup Wiz told it found Microsoft’s AI research division’s GitHub repository while investigating accidental cloud data exposure. Open source code and …

Microsoft released the public preview of Python in Excel today, allowing advanced spreadsheet users to combine Python scripts and Excel formulas in the same workbook. This feature will first be released to Microsoft 365 Insiders in Excel for Windows beta. While the feature will initially only be available in Excel …

UK antitrust regulator confirms April decision to block $68.7BN Microsoft-Activision gaming mega-merger, rejecting Microsoft’s arguments that it should overturn its original prohibition due to developments. Microsoft’s restructured proposal was recently reviewed by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which announced a new investigation today. The tech giant would not acquire …

Microsoft doesn’t know or want to discuss how China-backed hackers obtained a key to covertly break into hundreds of email inboxes, including those of multiple federal government institutions. In a blog post Friday, Microsoft said it was “ongoing investigation” how the hackers obtained a Microsoft signature key and used it …

Microsoft confirmed that Chinese hackers breached U.S. government employee email accounts using a cloud email service flaw. Microsoft reported that Storm-0558 compromised 25 government agency email accounts and related consumer accounts linked to these organizations. Microsoft calls new or developing hacking groups “Storm.” Microsoft hasn’t named Storm-0558’s government targets. Reported …

Microsoft announced several AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and Edge sidebar chatbot today. Microsoft Edge’s shopping features haven’t been popular, but this new set of tools looks useful. Bing will now automatically generate buying guides for queries like “college supplies” using GPT-powered AI. It will automatically …

Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end data and analytics platform, launched today. The new platform, which centers around Microsoft’s OneLake data lake but can also pull data from Amazon S3 and (soon) Google Cloud Platform, includes integration tools, a Spark-based data engineering platform, a real-time analytics platform, and, thanks to Power BI’s …

Microsoft and OpenAI launched ChatGPT just months ago, igniting tech enthusiasts and industry leaders. This generative AI’s technology is now reaching remote villages hundreds of miles from Seattle and San Francisco. Jugalbandi, a chatbot developed by Microsoft, OpenNyAI, and AI4Bharat and backed by the Indian government, is improving information access …