Microsoft reportedly planning to lay off thousands of employees, mostly in sales by Usama Jawad Back in May 2025, Microsoft decided to lay off 3% of its workforce, which amounted to roughly 6,000 employees. It claimed that this decision allowed it to implement better organizational changes in a "dynamic marketplace". Now, a new report claims that the Redmond tech firm is planning to lay off thousands more next month. Citing unnamed sources, Bloomberg reports that as the company continues investing heavily in its AI ventures, it is about to announce layoffs of thousands of workers as early as next month. This reduction in workforce will primarily affect sales teams, but they won't be the only ones affected. That said, the sources did mention that the timing for this announcement may change. This move, if true, won't be entirely surprising. In April 2025, Microsoft announced that it will be relying more on third-party firms to sell its software to small- and medium-sized customers. It's currently unclear how many employees will be impacted by this change, but even if the layoff percentage is in the single digits, it would still be significant as it would be impacting the professional careers of thousands. The May 2025 layoffs primarily impacted engineering and product teams. The other major round of layoffs prior to this was the decision to eliminate 10,000 jobs back in January 2023. Those represented 5% of the total workforce at that time, with numerous teams, including the one leading Mixed Reality (MR) efforts, being heavily impacted. It is interesting to note that if the timing of the announcement for layoffs is accurate, it would be soon after Microsoft closes its fiscal year at the end of June 2025. Although we'll get financial reports for the latest quarter soon after too, one has to wonder what the human cost of profit is, as Microsoft continues to report billions of dollars in revenue every quarter. Source: Bloomberg (paywall)

Ah .. lockout for suspicious activity. I bet they uploaded the SanDisk utility detected as malware

Microsoft 365 will soon disable outdated authentication protocols for file access by Usama Jawad On a fairly regular basis, Microsoft disables outdated protocols that are used to access its services. In the past few years, the company has deprecated Basic Auth in Exchange Online and cut access to Outlook for third-party apps relying on this protocol. Now, it has decided to get rid of old authentication protocols for file access across Microsoft 365 services. As reported by Bleeping Computer, Microsoft has posted a message on its Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Starting from mid-July 2025, the company will begin disabling legacy authentication protocols used to access files across Microsoft 365 and Office apps, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Essentially, applications or services which use the Relying Party Suite (RPS) or FrontPage Remote Procedure Call (FPRPC) will to perform browser-based authentication to perform open operations on Office files will no longer be able to do so. As expected, this is primarily being done to improve the cybersecurity posture of various services. Microsoft states that RPS can be brute-forced and phished with relative ease as it is fairly outdated. Similarly, FPRPC is typically used for remote web page authoring and it is susceptible to exploitation through various vulnerabilities too. As such, both of these protocols will be disabled by default starting from mid-July 2025, with the rollout of this change targeting completion by August 2025. The Redmond tech giant will update the protocol baseline by default without mandating any licensing changes for customers. In addition, once these modifications are rolled out, Microsoft 365 will require admin consent to get third-party access to files and sites. IT admins can view the guidance available here to configure admin consent workflows. Microsoft says that these changes align with the principles of its Secure Future Initiative (SFI). Earlier today, it announced the rollout of improved security defaults for Windows 365 citing the same reasons too.

This is how you kill your own business.

So could i run Office apps on a linux desktop?