Daily Tech News 14 November 2026

• Look out, there were llamas: Outlook did a thing. (Ars Technica)
  
  Or more precisely, didn't do a thing.
  
  Microsoft themselves explains:

  While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.

  — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026

  
  What does that mean? Nobody knows. Here is a public replica of that admin center feed which many people could not access during the outage (or at all).
  
  Does it explain what the problem was?
  
  No. The most detail it gives is this:

  This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.

  Some people did something.
  
  Reading between the lines, Microsoft fucked up monitoring so that a lot of healthy servers were automatically rebooted, dumping the load on other servers, which were then marked as unhealthy in turn and rebooted, leading to a circular wave of failures spanning the entire planet for 18 hours.
  
  
  

• Nvidia chips banned from export to China by the US - and banned from import into China by China - were used to train China's lead AI models. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Things that make you go Yeah, Gamer's Nexus covered that a year ago. (YouTube)
  
  
  
• Schools that banned Google's AI services are upset that they banned Google's AI services. (The Guardian)
  
  Google Search may be terrible and filled with AI these days, but if you ban it you don't get to complain that you banned it.
  
  
  
• The ESA has suffered a 1.7 petabyte data breach, covering 900 million... Oh. (Reuters)
  
  It's an astronomical survey covering 900 million galaxies. Paid subscribers can also request the data on 1.2 billion floppy disks.
  
  
  
• Intel has shipped the Core Ultra 7 260k processor, which drops into their lineup between the 250k and the 270k. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Can't really fault their arithmetic.
  
  It has 8 performance cores and 12 efficiency cores. The 250k is a 6P / 12E chip; the 270k is 8P / 16E.
  
  Not available as a boxed CPU; only to OEMs for prebuilt systems.
  
  
  
• The Beelink GTR9 Pro looks like a Mac Studio and runs like a Mac Mini. (Notebook Check)
  
  To be fair, the CPU-side is faster than any Mac Mini and even beats a M5 Max Mac Studio, losing out only to the very expensive M5 Ultra. And it comes with up to 192GB of RAM on board, three times the Mac Mini's limit.
  
  Where it falls down is memory bandwidth, which is a little less than the M5 Pro Mac Mini and only half of the Mac Studio. And that's pretty important for AI tasks, this system's target market.
  
  It would make a very nice desktop PC, though... If it cost one fifth of its $8099 MSRP.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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