#microsoft Tech News.

Microsoft announced that its cloud and AI platforms are driving modernization across the Asia Pacific region. The company highlighted enterprise adoption of Azure AI and Copilot services to accelerate digital transformation for businesses and governments in the area.

Windows 11 Beta build 26220.8925 adds Start menu customization, including size adjustment and section toggles. The Recommended section is renamed to Recent. File Explorer now shows file sizes in KB, MB, and GB instead of just KB.

Microsoft's new 8GB Surface Laptop hangs or freezes for several seconds during Microsoft Teams video calls. The device handles basic tasks like web browsing and video streaming, but the bloat of Windows 11 overwhelms the 8GB memory in conferencing scenarios.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have each introduced or renamed an enterprise agent platform over the past nine months. All three now share the same core architecture: runtime, memory, tool gateway, identity, observability, and governance. These components appear in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Microsoft Foundry, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform under different names.

Microsoft is expanding Azure's AI infrastructure with AMD's Helios platform, challenging Nvidia's GPU systems in the second half of 2026. A public GitHub profile suggests Anthropic is also testing AMD hardware, increasing pressure on Nvidia's pricing power.

The Document Foundation criticized Microsoft's OOXML formats for creating vendor lock-in. OOXML Transitional, the default format used daily by hundreds of millions, is only implemented correctly by Microsoft's own software. The cleaner OOXML Strict variant has disappeared from some versions, making true interoperability impossible.

Doom director Hugo Martin denied reports id Software was gutted after Microsoft layoffs. Current and former employees told Game Developer they disagree, saying around two thirds of the Doom (2016) team were laid off. One source called the team "half here, half thrown away.

Microsoft's Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) is experiencing severe degradation due to a buildup of publishing metadata, causing slow synchronizations and timeouts for organizations. The issue is unrelated to Patch Tuesday, with heightened impact observed starting July 13, 2026.

AMD will ship its first rack-scale AI system, Helios, to Microsoft and other customers later this year. Each rack packs 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs with 31 terabytes of HBM4 memory and 2.9 exaflops of FP4 inference. Microsoft will use Helios to power new Azure ND MI455X v7 instances optimized for inference workloads.

Microsoft released emergency out-of-band updates KB5121767 and KB5121768 to fix Dell PC shutdowns and performance issues caused by a conflict between the Windows USB-C Connection Manager interface and the Intel Innovation Platform Framework Processor Participant driver after the July 2026 security update KB5101650.