Microsoft Corp. said Saturday it’s no longer detecting issues with its Azure cloud platform after multiple international cables in the Red Sea were cut, Engadget reported.

Microsoft said its Azure cloud platform has returned to normal service after an incident of cut underwater cables that played out over Saturday. The tech giant reported “undersea fiber cuts” in the Red Sea on Saturday morning, which disrupted Azure service throughout the Middle Eat and led to potential “increased latency” for users. 

Microsoft said that the latency issue was resolved by Saturday evening and was able to reroute the Azure traffic through other paths.

Microsoft didn’t provide a reason for why the undersea cables were cut. These cables sit on the ocean floor and play the crucial role of delivering massive amounts of data across the world. 

While ships dropping anchors can sometimes damage undersea cables, there have been more international circumstances in the past. In 2024, the internationally recognized government of Yemen claimed that the country’s Houthi movement was responsible for cutting cables in the Red Sea. 

The Associated Press reported: United cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted international access is parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said Sunday, though it was not immediately clear what caused the incident.

There has been concern about the cables being targeted in a Red Sea campaign by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, which the rebels describe as an effort to pressure Israel to end its war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But the Houthis have denied attacking the lines in the past.

Undersea cables are one of the backbones of the internet, along with satellite connections and land-based cables. Typically, internet service providers have multiple access points and reroute traffic if one fails, though it can slow down access for users.

Microsoft announced via a status website that the Mideast “may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea.” The Redmond, Washington-based firm did not immediately elaborate, though it said that internet traffic not moving through the Middle East “is not impacted.”

TechCrunch reported: Microsoft said Saturday that clients of its Azure platform might experience increased latency after multiple undersea cables were cut in the Red Sea, as reported in Bloomberg.

In a status update, the company said traffic going through the Middle East or ending in Asia or Europe had been affected. It did not say who had cut the cables or why.

“Undersea fiber cuts can take time to repair, such as we continuously monitor, rebalance and optimize routing to reduce customer impact in the meantime,” the status update said.

By Saturday evening, Microsoft said it was no longer detecting any Azure issues. But it seems Azure was not the only service affected, with NetBlocks reported that “a series of subsea cable outages in the Red Sea has degraded internet connectivity in multiple countries.”

Several hacking groups with ties to the Chinese government have been linked to a recent wave of widespread attacks targeting a Microsoft SharePoint zero-day vulnerability chain, Bleeping Computer reported.

They used this exploit chain (dubbed “ToolShell”) to breach dozens of organizations worldwide after hacking into their on-premise SharePoint servers.

“Microsoft has observed two named Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon exploiting these vulnerabilities targeting internet-facing SharePoint servers” Microsoft said in a Tuesday report. 

“In addition, we have observed another China-based threat actor, tracked as Storm-2603, exploiting these vulnerabilities. Investigations into other actors also using these exploits are still ongoing.”

Microsoft reported: On July 19, 2025, Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) published a blog addressing active attacks against on-premises SharePoint servers that exploit CVE-2025-49706, a spoofing vulnerability, and CVE-2025-40704, a remote code execution vulnerability. 

These vulnerabilities affect on premises SharePoint servers only and do not affect the SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365. Microsoft has released new comprehensive security updates for all supported versions of SharePoint Server (Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016) that protect customers against these new vulnerabilities. Customers should apply these updates immediately to ensure they are protected.

These comprehensive security updates address newly disclosed security vulnerabilities in CVE-2025-53770 that are released to the previously disclosed vulnerability CVE-2025-49704. The updates also address the security bypass vulnerability CVE-2025-53771 for the previously disclosed CVE-2025-49706.

TechCrunch reported: Security researchers at Google and Microsoft say they have evidence that hackers backed by China are exploiting a zero-day bug in Microsoft SharePoint, as companies around the world scramble to patch the flaw.

The bug, known officially as CVE-2025-53770 and discovered last weekend, allows hackers to steal sensitivity private keys from self-hosted versions of SharePoint, a software server widely used by companies and organizations to store and share internal documents. Once exploited, an attacker can use the bug to remotely plant malware and gain access to the files and data stored within, as well as gain access to other systems on the same network.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said it had observed at least two previously identified China-backed hacking groups it calls “Linen Typhoon” and “Violet Typhoon” exploiting the SharePoint zero-day. Microsoft says Linen Typhoon is focused on stealing intellectual property, while Violet Typhoon steals private information to be used for espionage.

To comply with a Trump executive order, Microsoft recently helped suspend the email account of an International Criminal Court prosecutor in the Netherlands who was investigating Israel for war crimes, The New York Times reported.

When President Trump issued an executive order in February against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for investigating Israel for war crimes, Microsoft was suddenly thrust into the middle of a geopolitical fight.

For years, Microsoft had supplied the court — which is based in The Hague in the Netherlands and investigates and prosecutes human rights breaches, genocides and other crimes of international concern — with digital services such as email. Mr. Trump’s order abruptly threw that relationship into disarray by barring U.S. companies from providing services to the prosecutor, Karim Khan.

Soon after, Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., helped turn off Mr. Khan’s I.C.C. email account, freezing him out of communications with colleagues just a few months after the court had issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for his country’s actions in Gaza.

Microsoft’s swift compliance with Mr. Trump’s order, reported earlier by The Associated Press, shocked policymakers across Europe. It was a wake-up call for a problem far bigger than just one email account, stoking fears that the Trump administration would leverage America’s tech dominance to penalize opponents, even in allied countries like the Netherlands. 

TechCrunch reported: European governments may be reconsidering their use of American technology and services, according to a new report in The New York Times.

The flashpoint seems to come after President Donald Trump sanctioned Karim Kahn, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, over the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

In response, Microsoft turned off Khan’s email address. Capsper Kynge, a former diplomat who has worked for Microsoft, told the NYT that Microsoft’s action became “the smoking gun that many Europeans had been looking for,” pushing them to look at alternative options. Some ICC workers have reportedly switched over to Swiss email service Proton, for example. 

Cryptopolitan reported: A growing number of Europeans are turning away from American tech giants and seeking out home-grown digital services as U.S. companies align with President Donald Trump’s administration.

At a small stall in a Berlin market, volunteers from the charity Topio are overwriting Google’s standard Android software on visitors’ phones with a version that removes ties to U.S. platforms. Since Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, more people have lined up for the free service, according to a Reuters report.

Data from the firm Similarweb shows a rise in searches across Europe for email, messaging and search tools that are not based in the United States. Users say their interest increased after Trump signaled he would dial back American’s role in European defense and new tariffs on EU goods.

Microsoft and Asus have just announced two ROG Xbox Ally devices that include a new full-screen Xbox experience for handhelds. After promising to combine “the best of Xbox and Windows together” for handhelds this year, Microsoft is now revealing exactly how it is overhauling the Xbox app, Game Bar, and Windows itself to better to compete with SteamOS, The Verge reported.

Microsoft has needed to respond to SteamOS ever since the Steam Deck launched three years ago, and it has steadily been tweaking its Xbox app and the Xbox Game Bar on Windows to make both more handheld-friendly. But there was always a bigger overhaul of Windows required, and we’re starting to see parts of that today.

The reality is that we’ve made tremendous progress on this over the past couple of years, and this is really the device that galvanized those teams and everybody marching and working towards a moment that we’re just really excited to put into the hands of players,” says Roanne Sones, corporate vice president of gaming Devices and ecosystem at Xbox, in a briefing with The Verge.

ArsTechnia reported: Back in March, we outlined six features we wanted to see on what was then just a rumored Xbox-branded, Windows-powered handheld gaming device. Today, Microsoft’s announcement of the Asus ROG Xbox Ally hardware line looks like it fulfills almost all of our wishes for Microsoft’s biggest foray into the portable gaming yet.

The Windows-11-powered Xbox Ally devices promise access to “all of the games available on Windows,” including “games from Xbox, Game Pass, Battle.net, and other leading PC storefronts.” But instead of having to install and boot up those games through the stock Windows interface, a you often do on handhelds like the original ROG Ally line, all these games will be available through what Microsoft is calling an “aggregated gaming library.” 

Asus and Microsoft are stressing how that integrated experience can be used with games across multiple different Windows-based launchers, promising “access to games you can’t get elsewhere.” That could be a subtle dig at SteamOS powered devices like the Steam Deck, which can have significant trouble with certain titles that don’t play well with Steam and/or Linux for one reason or another.

GamesBeat reported: Microsoft announced that it is diving into the handheld gaming market with its own Xbox-branded handheld in partnership with PC maker Asus.

It’s called the ROG Xbox Ally (16GB) and ROG Xbox Ally X (24GB). It has Hollow Knight game available at launch. Shawn Yen, vice president of consumer at Asus, said that Ally is short for “all your games.

The company plans to launch the handheld in 2025. As such, it will compete with rivals such as Nintendo Switch 2 and the Valve Steam Deck. There are already a number of Windows-based devices on the handheld PC market, but those have had mixed results. 

Microsoft announced: Today, we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo.

That means that the code that powers WSL is now available on GitHub at Microsoft/WSL and open sourced to the community! You can download WSL and build it from source, add new fixes and features and participate in WSL’s active development.

WSL was the first announced BUILD back in 2016 and first shipped with the Windows 10 Anniversary update.

At that time, WSL was based on a pico process provider, lxcore.sys, which enabled Windows to natively run ELF executables, and implement Linux sys calls inside the Windows kernel. This eventually became what we today know as “WSL 1”, which WSL still supports. 

Over time it became clear that the best way to provide optimal compatibility with native Linux was to rely on the Linux kernel itself. WSL 2 was born, and first announced in 2019.

Bleeping Computer reported: Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), making its source code available in GitHub, except for a few components that are part of Windows.

This makes a milestone for a project that started as an experiment almost a decade ago but has grown to become a very popular tool in Windows.

It’s first release, WSL 1, utilized a compatibility layer that translated Linux system calls so they could communicate and work with the Windows NT kernel using a custom driver named lxcore.sys.

Now, at Microsoft Build 2025, the company has made WSL open source, including its command-line tools, background services, and Linux-side daemons used to start networking, launch other daemons, and set up port forwarding.

“WSL could never have been what it is today without its community. Even without access to WLS’s source code, people have been ablate make major contributions that lead to what WSL is now,” Microsoft’s Pierre Boulay shared in an announcement.

The Verge reported: Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. 

After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge.

“It took a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.” 

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected a legal challenge by the Federal Trade Commission to Microsoft’s $69 billion purchase of “Call of Duty” maker Activision Blizzard, Reuters reported.

The San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower judges order that said the FTC was not entitled to a preliminary injunction blocking the deal, which closed in 2023.

A three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the lower judge had applied the correct standards and said the FTC had not shown it was likely to succeed on its claims that the merger would restrict competition.

A spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision came in an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 2022 against Xbox maker Microsoft. 

The FTC, which enforces antitrust law, separately challenged the merger in an internal administrative action. That proceeding was placed on hold in 2023 during President Biden’s administration, pending the 9th Circuit’s decision.

The Activision Blizzard transaction marked the largest-ever acquisition in the video gaming market. The deal closed in late 2023 after competition experts in the UK approved it. The purchase also faced regulatory scrutiny in other international markets. 

The FTC’s lawsuit sought an order freezing the Activision transaction while the agency pursued its administrative challenge.

The agency claimed that the Microsoft-Activision tie-up would allow the merged company to fend off competitors to the Xbox console and to its subscription and cloud based gaming business.

XboxEra  reported: A federal court today has rendered a verdict on an appeal the FTC filed requesting an injunction against the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

The 9th U.S. Court of San Francisco has upheld the ruling of a lower court judge that stated the FTC was not entered to a preliminary injunction. The FTC was attempting to stop Microsoft from Acquiring Activision Blizzard King. The deal was finalized back in 2023, showing how long the wheels of justice can take to our turn in America.

After nearly 2 years of regulatory back and forth between Microsoft, Activision, Sony, and several other gaming companies and government agencies, Microsoft announced today that they have officially acquire Activision-Blizzard-King.

With ABK now under Microsoft, the company is the proprietor of a bounty of valuable IP, including Call of Duty and Diablo. Comments by CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spenser suggest interest in reviving dormant IP in the Activision-Blizzard vault as well.

These comments suggest the company may look to extract as much value as possible from their recently approved purchase that will undoubtedly help the growth of their gaming subscription Game Pass.