Microsoft

Microsoft has benefited substantially from the rise of AI. Its partnership and close relationship with OpenAI has continued through 2024, as it looks to establish its Copilot chatbot as a go-to tool across its software and hardware offerings, even dedicating a button to it on future Windows device keyboards. TechCrunch covers those developments, and its other recent moves like unbundling Teams and Office and successfully defeating an antitrust challenge against its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Microsoft has a long and tangled history with OpenAI, having invested a reported $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker as part of a long-term partnership. As part of the deal,…

Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search

Bing is the latest search engine to introduce generative AI into its results, with Microsoft announcing that it’s making Bing generative search available to a…

TechCrunch Minute: Microsoft brings more generative AI to Bing

The Overture Maps Foundation is today releasing data sets for 2.3B building “footprints” globally, 54M notable places of interest, a visual overlay of “boundaries,” and land and water features such…

Backed by Microsoft, AWS and Meta, the Overture Maps Foundation launches its first open map datasets

Employees at Bethesda Game Studios — the Microsoft-owned game developer that produces the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises — are joining the Communications Workers of America union. Quality assurance testers…

Bethesda Game Studios employees form a ‘wall-to-wall’ union

Around 8.5 million devices — less than 1 percent of Windows machines globally — were affected by the recent CrowdStrike outage, according to a Microsoft blog post by David Weston,…

Microsoft says 8.5M Windows devices were affected by CrowdStrike outage

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Faulty CrowdStrike update causes major global IT outage, taking out banks, airlines and businesses globally

Security giant CrowdStrike said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack, as businesses anticipate widespread disruption.

Faulty CrowdStrike update causes major global IT outage, taking out banks, airlines and businesses globally

The Designer app features “prompt templates” that are designed to help jumpstart the creative process.

Microsoft’s AI-powered, Canva-like Designer app lands on iOS and Android

U.K. authorities have until early September to decide whether the hiring is tantamount to a merger.

Microsoft faces UK antitrust probe after hiring Inflection AI founders and employees

Welcome back to another recap of Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast about the business of startups. This episode is packed with deals, antitrust musings, AI and…

There’s always something happening to OpenAI’s board

Cybersecurity experts are criticizing Microsoft for data breach notification emails that are confusing customers.

Microsoft emails that warned customers of Russian hacks criticized for looking like spam and phishing

The core issue relates to a 2019 licensing change whereby Microsoft made it more expensive to run Microsoft’s enterprise software on rival cloud services.

Microsoft settles with European cloud trade body over antitrust complaints

This likely rules out reports of Apple gaining an observer seat.

As Microsoft leaves its observer seat, OpenAI says it won’t have any more observers

We’ve poked through the many product announcements made by the biggest tech companies and product trade shows of the year, so far, and compiled them into this list.

Here are the hottest product announcements from Apple, Google, Microsoft and others so far in 2024

Microsoft’s AI CEO has a cozy relationship with the man who used to be his rival, he said on Tuesday.

Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says he loves Sam Altman, believes he’s sincere about AI safety

Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources, is used by more than 90% of all Fortune 1000 companies and many more besides. So it’s no…

Semperis, a specialist in Active Directory security now worth more than $1B, raises $125M

A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets.  As of this…

Security bug allows anyone to spoof Microsoft employee emails

FTC Chair Lina Khan was the youngest person appointed to her position when she assumed the job in 2021. But once her term ends in September —  after which she’ll…

FTC Chair Lina Khan on startups, scaling, and ”innovations in potential lawbreaking”

For centuries, people chewed willow tree bark to relieve pain, but scientists at chemical firm Bayer didn’t isolate its active ingredient until the 1800s and eventually patented its modified version…

Enveda raises $55M to combine ancient remedies with AI for drug discovery

LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups. The move comes more than three months after…

LinkedIn to limit targeted ads in EU after complaint over sensitive data use

Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…

Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite

Microsoft, Meta, Intel, AMD and others have formed a new group to design next-gen interconnects for AI accelerator hardware.

Tech giants form an industry group to help develop next-gen AI chip components

Microsoft’s Copilot, a generative AI-powered tool that can generate text as well as answer specific questions, is now available as an in-app chatbot on Telegram, the instant messaging app.  Currently…

Microsoft’s Copilot is now on Telegram

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it…

Bing’s API was down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too

AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known…

Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice

A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup…

Bolster, creator of the CheckPhish phishing tracker, raises $14M led by Microsoft’s M12

Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Microsoft announced on Tuesday during its annual Build conference that it’s bringing “Windows Volumetric Apps” to Meta Quest headsets. The partnership will allow Microsoft to bring Windows 365 and local…

Microsoft’s new ‘Volumetric Apps’ for Quest headsets extend Windows apps into the 3D space

Microsoft wants to put its Copilot everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft renames its annual Build developer conference to Microsoft Copilot. Hopefully, some of those upcoming events…

Microsoft’s Power Automate no-code platform adds AI flows

Microsoft’s big focus at this year’s Build conference is generative AI. And to that end, the tech giant announced a series of updates to its platforms for building generative AI-powered…

Microsoft upgrades its AI app-building platforms

Microsoft wants to make its brand of generative AI more useful for teams — specifically teams across corporations and large enterprise organizations. This morning at its annual Build dev conference,…

Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams