The video/headlines make it sound like a mass layoff, so I went through Microsoft's post and coverage.

Microsoft's own post (Oct 26, 2026, Amy Coleman, chief people officer): a voluntary exit offer, a time-limited, voluntary programme for eligible employees in participating orgs in Canada, India, the UK and the US, level 70 and below. Offers financial support and career planning resources. No headcount or deadline is stated in the post.

GeekWire: about 60,000 eligible, roughly a quarter of 223,000 employees (that's where 27% comes from, but eligible isn't leaving). No age, tenure or performance criteria. Level 70 includes GMs and some VPs, not CVPs. Sales isn't participating, and neither are some engineering and corporate groups. The package reportedly equals standard severance (tenure/level-based pay, stock vesting continues, healthcare for a fixed period, and career transition). Deadline: first week of December. Business Standard, citing ET, says Dec 1 for India and notes about 23,000 employees in India with the eligible number unclear. The PTI-reported "one month base pay per year of service" wasn't confirmed by Business Standard.

Context per GeekWire: spring voluntary retirement programme (US, level 67 and below), about 30% of ~8,750 eligible took it, $900M charge. July: 4,800 cuts (~2%). September: hundreds more. 2025: 15,000+. Microsoft says this offer doesn't mean it needs fewer employees and isn't a replacement for layoffs and expects far lower uptake than spring.

Same week: Amex announced about 3,500 cuts (about 5%) on Oct 23. Barclays 5,000 and eBay ~1,000 appear in one outlet only (Eurasia Business News), so they are unconfirmed by me. Amex's CEO framed it as efficiency, not a downturn, while CNBC's headline ties it to AI prep.

Anyone at Microsoft India who's seen how eligibility is being decided in their org?

Sources: Microsoft, GeekWire, Business Standard, Eurasia Business News

Hello people, my grandmother does not have a way to get her Computer in bitlocked, it’s windows 11 and she doesn’t have the key for it. the administrator of the computer no longer speaks to her. Does anyone know a way to fix it?

Hello! I’m a music composer working on a dance project, and would like to have small drums (around 15 cm in diameter) attached to some of the dancers’ costumes, with taps on the drums triggering sounds in the electronic music. I'm just a bit unsure about the technical side of things as I'm not too familiar with all of it!

Based on my research, it seems like I could use a piezo sensor attached to a Raspberry Pi Pico W (or other similar device?)- both within the drum on the costume - which would detect the impacts and send a wireless signal to my laptop (Max/MSP or Ableton) to trigger a specific sound.

I'm quite new to this kind of electronics, so I’m not really sure how to go about setting this up beyond the above! I'm thinking of ordering piezo sensors and a Raspberry Pi Pico W to try things out myself first, but am aware I might have to add extra electrical connections between those two?

Would this be a sensible approach? Are there any easier alternatives for a beginner? Are there any other things I've missed out or that I'd need to procure myself? Any tips, alternative approaches or resources for a beginner would be much appreciated - thanks :))

Our org is a Microsoft shop. Thus, for compatibility reasons, it would generally be easier to use Microsoft cloud and AI products/services. However, Amazon salespeople have been lubricating our executives to use Amazon cloud & AI instead, with discounts, free training, demos, etc. The MS salespeople are absent or sleepy for some reason.😴 What gives?

Wake up, Microsoft, or else Amazon will eat your lunch just as you ate up IBM's lunch in the 1980's. They act hungry, you don't.

(I have no personal love for Microsoft or their products, but I also have no personal love for Amazon. Compatibility is just more convenient, all things being equal.)

Hey everyone!

I'm reaching out here as a last resort, hoping that someone might be able to help me.

I have a Brother DS-720D portable scanner that still works, but unfortunately, one side of the scanned documents always comes out yellowish.

After doing some research, I discovered that the scanner uses a special calibration sheet, which I unfortunately don't have.

The part number is LD0932001, and as far as I know, it's used with the Brother DS-720D and DS-920DW.

I've searched eBay, Google, spare parts websites, and pretty much everywhere I could think of, but I simply cannot find one to buy.

It genuinely hurts to see a perfectly functional little scanner become practically unusable just because of a piece of calibration paper that's almost impossible to find.

Even if you don't have one yourself, any advice, alternative solution, or information about where I could find one would mean a lot.

Thank you so much for reading. Fingers crossed that someone out there still has one! ❤️

I got a free samsung by opening a second line on my plan and my samsung galaxy s26 and quickly i saw it has someone elses games on it and it came with a screen protector already on instead of a seal that u can peel off. Later i started receiving messages from the persons parents and friends and people wishing happy birthday, i was also put into various group chats discussing sensitive family matters but quickly left and i found out their name aswell. Then i would get doordash messages and bank messages. I know that if i had bad intentions i could exploit the hell out of this and do some badd things. I also found the persons social medias by seeing autofill results. My main question is how is this even possible??? This has to be something super off on T mobiles end to let this get through.

I'd like to start by saying sorry if this sounds stupid, I'm not great with understanding the ins and outs of PC parts. I currently have a Radeon RX Vega graphics card, but it can't update to AMD driver version 32.0.22042, which I need to play Helldivers II Smoothly. If I could have any recommendations for any possible upgrades, or if there's anyway to update it that'd be greatly appreciated, thanks!

My laptop (Lenovo Legion 7) recently crashed with a CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED error, and afterward the SSD completely disappeared from BIOS. I tried reseating it and testing it in both M.2 slots, but neither worked. I also tested it using a friend's NVMe dock, and it wasn't detected there either, so I'm pretty sure the SSD itself is dead. The original SSD was a 1TB SK hynix PC801.

Now I'm looking to buy a replacement, and I'm thinking I might as well upgrade to 2TB while I'm at it.

I'm wondering whether it's better to get a single 2TB SSD or two separate 1TB SSDs. Is there any real performance advantage to either setup?

I'd also appreciate some specific SSD recommendations. I want something reliable that won't bottleneck my laptop or compromise its speed, but I also don't want to overpay for performance my laptop can't take advantage of.

What would you guys recommend?

Not a coder myself, know enough about technology to follow instructions but not enough to be an expert.

Hypothetically, or i guess in practice, could a flash drive with an executable program on it change a device setting or circumnavigate administrator restrictions? Not as in could it fully and permanently root a device, but specifically disable administrator restrictions? Such as GoGuardian and things of the sort.

I work in a non-software related department.

They sent an email that if anyone thinks of AI use case ideas, share them. They'll compile a list of all ideas, and the AI dev team will go through it. They may implement something on the list depending on their business goals, and if it happens, there may be a prize for the person who suggested the idea.

It lowkey makes me mad. 😡

Like, you want us to do your discovery work for you! Shouldn't your AI dev team be doing the hard work of finding out use cases and exploring ways for adopting AI into our workflows? And we don't even get compensated for brainstorming ideas to automate some of our work tasks with AI!

It's like they dangle the carrot of getting a prize (if we come up with an idea that gets implemented) to get us to do their discovery work for them.

Am I right to feel slighted by this? Or is this normal and I'm overreacting?

I've always been kind of fascinated by how you can't really make a heater more or less efficient on the electronic side, because all electronics create heat as waste energy anyway. So it got me thinking, computers obviously put out heat, but does any of it not create heat? Besides the other somewhat obvious areas: fans, LEDs, radio waves (Wi-Fi etc).

It would fascinate me even more if some of those watts just kind of "disappeared" into computing energy. Kind of like how our brains burn calories just sitting around thinking...

Eli5 please im no expert

what can I do now that I have 2 iphones? (I replaced the cracked screen on my old phone)

Is the iphone 18 really worth it if you have a 17?

Hi, I'm having an issue with my laptop. When I install the RAM, the display comes on and everything starts, but the cooling fan doesn't spin and the CPU heats up(sound of takk) until the laptop shuts down. But if I remove the RAM and try to power it on, the fan starts running fast. It was working fine right after repair, but after a few days, the same problem started again. I've taken the laptop to repair multiple times, and the technician says the graphics card issue is fixed because the dedicated graphics card is turned off, and now it's running on the CPU's integrated graphics.it needs a motherboard replacement,am so confused

Hey guys, I was doing the dishes and didn't realize my phone fell in and was fully submerged in dirty dishwater for like 15-20 minutes. Yes, I'm an idiot. Is it toast? I immediately powered it off, dried it down, and haven't touched it since. Its been off for 30 ish hours, google recommends 48+. Just not really sure what to do, should i take it to apple store tmrw? Lowkey got it on kijiji so defo no warranty on it. #sendhelp.

So 3 days ago, I was plugging in my phone. And I heard a crackling/humming sound coming from where my Charger was plugged in. I re-plugged it and it did the same thing. Sometimes it takes minutes to happen. Other times it’s instant. Next day I tried the charger on multiple outlets. All of them did the same thing. The low Crackling sound when you put your ear Upto it, You can hear it clearer. Today I bought a new Apple charger, plugged that one into my outlet. It did it too. Now I’m very confused.

I am plugging it in within the basement. A place that is now my room, which is a former Wood workshop that had machines in those outlets. So my Room should be the most safest place for tech. And I need help because I don’t want to start a Fire, since I was already in a house fire and I’m panicking. Is this Normal or is it not? Because I bought a new charger and nothing fixed! And I have my Light, USB-C cable for my VR, and PC plugged in and they’re not doing the sound. It’s only my Apple charger.

I just need guidance because I genuinely don’t know what this could be 😭

I’m hitting my storage limit on Google cloud. I realized my iPhone library has been backing up to Google cloud, but all my iPhone pics are already in Apple cloud so I don’t want to pay for more storage.

However, I have photos (wedding photos and ones shared with me via Google albums) that are just in Google.

There’s way to many to go thru and I’m scared to bulk delete from Google without knowing for sure I won’t lose non-duplicate photos.

What are the safest/most efficient ways to delete only the duplicate photos from Google cloud?

A family member of mine wrote a lot of stories on their typewriter back in the day and left them to me in a big stack of A4 paper. I'm looking for a tool that can copy the text from the scans I've done so that I can put it all together and typeset it into a complete book for my family. However, I don't want to use anything that will collect / use the data to train their AI or whatever else they like to do these days. Suggestions are very much appreciated.

Hello!

So i have Lenovo5i that has a NVME ssd where windows is and then i had a HDD on a 2.5' bay, which failed so i bought a SSD that fitted and plugged it in on the already existing SATA and all went well.

Afterwards, about 3 days after i see that the SSD disappeared on windows, unable to be gound ond device and disk management and on bios.

I open the laptop again and see that the sata part that connects to the mobo was disconnected so i pluged it in, restarted and still have the same problem.

Thinking it was the cable, i bought a new cable, tried again and i'm still not able to have it appear.

Can someone help me out?

Thanks in advance

Hi everyone,
Just wondering about phones listening to us and how true it is. So I recently went and done my padi scuba diving course and my tik tok has never shown me anything about scuba diving. Obviously been talking about it with the rest of the group everyday. I haven’t really searched anything to do with diving only one thing. All of a sudden my tik tok is just people scuba diving in different places around the world. This has happened with other things before which I can’t recall right now but I usually just thought oh I’m just paranoid. But this time I’m like woah that’s weird. Is it true hahaha?

Hi all!!

I’m looking for recommendations on a new phone. I currently have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and I’ve gotten most of the use that I can outta this puppy! I’ve been on the edge of switching to android but I do have a MacBook and I’m thinking of getting an iPad mini or an e reader for text book reading (college student here).

I’m open to everything. What are your thoughts?

how does the brave browser manage to force every website (or at least the ones i've visited) into dark mode ? i've already enabled "auto dark mode for web contents" in my browser (edge) but it doesn't work as good (｡•́︿•̀｡) how do i achieve this without downloading the brave browser or web extensions ?

Hello,

Im currently using windows 11 and it feels slow(comparing it to windows 7 or xp),most likely because it's very demanding and runs a lot of programs in the background,i disabled all the animations and stopped all those display enhancements like colors and fonts, became better but still,so what I'm looking is a software that scan it and disable all the unnecessary features and programs to optimize the hardware consumption.

My specs are ryzen 5 3400g cpu,a 16gb ram 3ghz,256gb ssd (win) +512gb hdd,i know my pc isn't top notch but it should at least be able to work fast and smooth when surfing or navigating through my local files.

Hey all, this is probably a dumb question but I’m not sure how to word it to find the answer I’m looking for on Google.

At work I use a shared computer. There are about 8 of us that log onto it and when we leave it we just lock it. Our accounts stay on the login background so we just click and login. Well, there is this one guy that we CANNOT figure out what he is doing. Every time he is the last to use it one of us go to log in and it says our password is incorrect and we have to sign in through guest.

What can I do to get this to not happen? Is he clicking on one of our accounts and trying to log in and since his password obviously isn’t going to work on ours it like blocks ours out now? It’s annoying asf.