In June 2022, Microsoft published the report on Russian cyber attacks and concluded that state-backed Russian hackers “have engaged in “strategic espionage” against governments, think tanks, businesses and aid groups” in 42 countries supporting Kyiv. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, announced that it had donated an initial batch of supplies, including 15,000 protection goggles, infrared thermometers, medical caps, and protective suits, to healthcare workers in Seattle, with further aid to come. The company was the official jersey sponsor of Finland’s national basketball team at EuroBasket 2015, a major sponsor of the Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT (2017–2020) and a sponsor of the Renault F1 Team (2016–2020). On August 23, 2012, Microsoft unveiled a new corporate https://www.mrsloty.uk/ logo at the opening of its 23rd Microsoft store in Boston, indicating the company’s shift of focus from the classic style to the tile-centric modern interface, which it uses/will use on the Windows Phone platform, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and the upcoming Office Suites.

Board of directors

The public cloud computing platform provides access to quantum software and quantum hardware including trapped ion, neutral atom, and superconducting systems. In the same month, Microsoft announced the open source implementation of Windows Forms and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which will allow for further movement of the company toward the transparent release of key frameworks used in developing Windows desktop applications and software. To cope with the potential for an increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of “holiday stores” across the U.S. to complement the increasing number of “bricks-and-mortar” Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012. Following the release of Windows Phone, Microsoft undertook a gradual rebranding of its product range throughout 2011 and 2012, with the corporation’s logos, products, services, and websites adopting the principles and concepts of the Metro design language.
Frequently criticized are the ease of use, robustness, and security of the company’s software. Microsoft initially moved onto the grounds of the campus on February 26, 1986, weeks before the company went public on March 13. In January 2020, the company announced a strategy to take the company carbon negative by 2030 and to remove all carbon that it has emitted since its foundation in 1975. In February 2010, however, Microsoft took a stance against adding additional public transport and high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes to the State Route 520 and its floating bridge connecting Redmond to Seattle; the company did not want to delay the construction any further. The “Connector” does not compete with the public bus system and works with it to provide a cohesive transportation network not just for its employees but also for the public. The Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, a report of how progressive the organization deems company policies towards LGBT employees, rated Microsoft as 87% from 2002 to 2004 and as 100% from 2005 to 2010 after it allowed gender expression.
In April 2016, the company sued the U.S. government, argued that secrecy orders were preventing the company from disclosing warrants to customers in violation of the company’s and customers’ rights. Following media reports about PRISM, NSA’s massive electronic surveillance program, in May 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Microsoft. A Microsoft spokesperson stated that the corporation runs several programs that facilitate the sharing of such information with the U.S. government. In July 2025, Microsoft announced another round of layoffs, cutting approximately 9,000 employees in its largest workforce reduction in over two years. In November 2018, the company won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring augmented reality (AR) headset technology into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers. On November 14, 2014, Microsoft overtook ExxonMobil to become the second most-valuable company by market capitalization, behind only Apple Inc.

• The company’s retail locations are part of a greater strategy to help build a connection with its consumers.
• Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector.
• In October 2014, Microsoft revealed that it was almost done with eliminating 18,000 employees, which was its largest-ever layoff sweep.
• It was announced that the division would be led by Jordan Hoffman, who previously worked for Deepmind and Inflection.
• As per company executives, Microsoft had been on the lookout for a flagship location since 2009.
• In November 2018, the company won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring augmented reality (AR) headset technology into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.

Founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to market BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, Microsoft rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. “We’re actively monitoring performance and making targeted adjustments to further improve stability and availability, while continuing recovery actions to ensure a reliable service experience.” ET said that the company has restored affected infrastructure and was directing traffic to other infrastructure to recover. ET, Microsoft said that it had found that “a portion of service infrastructure in North America” was not handling traffic correctly and that it was trying to fix the problem. ET, the company said in an X post that it was investigating an issue affecting Outlook.

Flagship stores

Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the rise of personal computers through software like Windows, and has since expanded to Internet services, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, video gaming, and other fields. Microsoft invited developers on Monday to start using Maia’s control software, but it’s not clear when users of the company’s Azure cloud service will be able to utilize servers running on the chip. According to the complaint and media reports, Microsoft’s cloud services may have been used to store or process surveillance-related data. The probe scrutinized Microsoft’s bundling of cloud services with products like Office and security tools, as well as its growing AI presence through its partnership with OpenAI. The program authorizes the government to secretly access data of non-US citizens hosted by American companies without a warrant.
On November 20, 2023, Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman, who had been ousted as CEO of OpenAI just days earlier, and Greg Brockman, who had resigned as president, would join Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. In June 2023, Microsoft released Azure Quantum Elements to run molecular simulations and calculations in computational chemistry and materials science using a combination of AI, high-performance computing and quantum computing. On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced a new multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment deal with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Microsoft is an outspoken opponent of the cap on H-1B visas, which allows companies in the U.S. to employ certain foreign workers. Noted for its internal lexicon, the expression “eating your own dog food” is used to describe the policy of using pre-release and beta versions of products inside Microsoft to test them in “real-world” situations. Helpful people can be elected by peers or Microsoft employees for Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status, which entitles them to a sort of special social status and possibilities for awards and other benefits. Free technical support is traditionally provided through online Usenet newsgroups, and CompuServe in the past, monitored by Microsoft employees; there can be several newsgroups for a single product. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. The group, accessed “a very small percentage” of Microsoft corporate email accounts, which also included members of its senior leadership team and employees in its cybersecurity and legal teams.

Global

In September 2024, BlackRock and Microsoft announced a $30 billion fund, the Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership, to invest in AI infrastructure such as data centers and energy projects. Microsoft stated that the underlying cause had been fixed but acknowledged ongoing residual impacts on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. Despite CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz clarifying that the issue was not a cyberattack, the incident had widespread consequences, leading to delays in air travel, financial transactions, and medical services globally. On July 19, 2024, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide.

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• On January 21, 2015, Microsoft announced the release of its first interactive whiteboard, named Surface Hub.
• The event started in the middle of U.S. business hours, leading people to address the snafu on social media as schools, government institutions and companies dealt with the outage.
• In 1972, they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data.
• People who use its products and services often end up becoming dependent on them, a process known as vendor lock-in.
• Concerns were raised about Microsoft’s licensing practices potentially locking customers into its services and its AI investments possibly sidestepping regulatory oversight.
• The DoJ had “changed data request rules on alerting the Internet users about agencies accessing their information.”

Microsoft also named Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox brand since 2014, the inaugural CEO of the newly established Microsoft Gaming division, which now houses the Xbox operations team and the three publishers in the company’s portfolio (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, Activision Blizzard). Microsoft plans to incorporate Ally.io into its Viva family of employee experience products. The acquisition positioned Microsoft to grow its presence in the market of providing online education to large numbers of people.

More apps in one place

In June 2024, Microsoft announced it would be laying off 1,000 employees from the company’s mixed reality and Azure cloud computing divisions. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems and the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, which most notably include the Word word processor, Excel spreadsheet editor, and the PowerPoint presentation program. Often described as a Big Tech company, Microsoft is the largest software company by revenue, one of the most valuable public companies,a and one of the most valuable brands globally. The employees, part of the group No Azure for Apartheid, sought to address the company’s involvement in the Israeli government’s use of its technology. Microsoft was the first company to participate in the PRISM surveillance program, according to leaked NSA documents obtained by The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013, and acknowledged by government officials following the leak.
In 1990, the Federal Trade Commission examined Microsoft for possible collusion due to the partnership with IBM, marking the beginning of more than a decade of legal clashes with the government. Microsoft released its version of OS/2 to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on April 2, 1987. In August 1977, the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office of ASCII Microsoft. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems’s (MITS) Altair 8800 microcomputer, which inspired Allen to suggest that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device. In 1972, they founded Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business using their skills in computer programming.
In May 2025, Microsoft issued an unsigned statement confirming that these services had been made available to Israel, while denying that these tools were employed during the massacre of the people of Gaza. In October 2024, Microsoft fired two employees, software engineers Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal, who organized an unauthorized vigil at its Redmond headquarters to honor Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. The European Commission issued a statement of objections, alleging Microsoft’s practice since 2019 gave Teams an unfair market advantage and limited interoperability with competing software.
On June 4, 2018, Microsoft officially announced the acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion, a deal that closed on October 26, 2018. The project is dubbed “Azure Government” and has ties to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) surveillance program. In March the company also established guidelines that censor users of Office 365 from using profanity in private documents. In March 2018, Microsoft recalled Windows 10 S to change it to a mode for the Windows operating system rather than a separate and unique operating system.

The company’s retail locations are part of a greater strategy to help build a connection with its consumers. As per company executives, Microsoft had been on the lookout for a flagship location since 2009. On October 26, 2015, the company opened its retail location on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It was announced that the division would be led by Jordan Hoffman, who previously worked for Deepmind and Inflection.