The recent trend of retrenchments in the tech industry has continued with Microsoft being the latest to lay off its workers. Specifically, around 10,000 employees were laid off by the tech giant.

While Microsoft recently announced that it would integrate OpenAI into all of its Office and Windows products, the first to get it looks to be its Azure OpenAI Service. Available starting this week, it will allow businesses to integrate OpenAI tools like DALL-E and soon ChatGPT for their cloud apps.

Microsoft has officially announced the end of Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 today. As of 10 January 2023, Microsoft will stop supplying security updates for these older operating systems.

Microsoft has announced that it is currently investigating an outage with its Microsoft Teams app, though the company did not detail how many users have been affected. Earlier today at around 10am Malaysian time, thousands of Microsoft Teams users reported that there are unable to access the app or use any of its features.

Microsoft Malaysia today announced the release of its Surface Laptop Go 2 lineup for our local market via commercial authorised resellers and authorised retailers. Offering a few upgrades over its predecessor, the most notable feature has got to be the better and more efficient 11th-gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor under the hood.

If you think the design of the Microsoft Xbox Series X is a bit dull, then this special edition of the console will probably change your mind. More so if you’re a fan of Marvel Studio’s Thor franchise as in collaboration with the superhero’s latest movie, Microsoft has turned the console into Mjolnir!

Microsoft today announced that it is bringing its popular PC Game Pass to Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries including Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. For the first time ever, a preview of the service is now available in the aforementioned countries.

Announced on its official website, Microsoft said that the PC Game Pass preview will give gamers access to a library of over 100 high-quality games. These include new Xbox Game Studios releases on day one, iconic Bethesda games and EA Play membership for one low monthly price. However, no pricing has been given just yet. 

Recently, we reported that Microsoft is potentially planning to put ads in Windows 11 File Explorer based on a screenshot shared by one of the OS’ build testers. Now, Microsoft has come out to address the matter, saying that the ads feature is merely an experimental banner.

Furthermore, the tech giant also said that the banner was never intended for external publication and has since been turned off in the latest Windows 11 test build. This is according a statement from Windows senior programme designer, Brandon LeBlanc that was sent to US-based tech portal The Verge.

Fresh after announcing their Qualcomm 8CX Gen 2 chipset for laptops, Qualcomm recently held a virtual briefing on their upcoming plans for Windows on Snapdragon laptops for Southeast Asia. Suffice to say, they have been working with various laptop makers to bring their Snapdragon 850 and 7c compute platforms to market in Malaysia, perhaps as soon as Q1 or Q2 of 2021.

Another week has gone by but there's nothing really much to talk about in the local tech scene in Malaysia. I mean sure, Merdeka sales here and there, and Shopee is coming up with another promo sale period leading up to 9.9. (which you stand a chance to win a Honda City car). Today is also the last day of the Samsung Galaxy Note10 and Galaxy Note10+ pre-order sales, although it's probably sold out already due to popular demand, you can still purchase them in authorized stores (see the list here). 

So...yeah. Let's get on with it on the NewsBytes already.