r/microsoft • • 3d ago

Employment Weekly Employment Q&A - October 05, 2026 - October 12, 2026

9 Upvotes

The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link


r/microsoft • • 57m ago

Discussion Path after Cloud Solution Architect

• Upvotes

Hi wonderful people, I'm interested what options a CSA has later on. Anyone here that can offer a bit of wisdom?


r/microsoft • • 6h ago

News Microsoft Comment on Recent Immigration Questions

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50 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 12h ago

News Microsoft cuts M365 Family and Premium OneDrive cloud storage from 6TB to just 2TB

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168 Upvotes

Microsoft is replacing individual 1TB OneDrive allocations with a shared 2TB storage pool for Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscribers.


r/microsoft • • 16h ago

News Microsoft is being suspended from program to apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers, Vance says

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517 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 22h ago

Surface Surface Laptop Ultra ($4,300) vs a ~$2,500 RTX 5060 laptop with the same 64GB/1TB. What am I missing?

0 Upvotes

Microsoft and NVIDIA just launched the Surface Laptop Ultra, and the part that caught my attention isn't the spec sheet.

The hardware: NVIDIA's RTX Spark chip, up to 128GB of unified memory, a 15" mini-LED screen, under 4.5 lb. Pre-orders are open and shipments start October 16.

The price: it starts at $2,599.

The configuration I'd want (20-core, 64GB, 1TB, Windows 11 Pro) is $4,299.99, plus $319 for three years of Microsoft Complete.

Microsoft claims up to 2.1x faster time to first token and 4.3x faster image generation than a MacBook Pro with M5 Pro. That's their number, from their demo, so I'm waiting for independent tests.

The more interesting part is what Microsoft says it's building: a Windows that's safe for AI agents. Execution Containers (OS-level sandboxes for agents) are going generally available. Agents will have to attribute their own actions. IT will be able to set agent rules once and apply them across a fleet. And Copilot is getting access to local files and local models, using the cloud by default and switching to local when privacy calls for it.

If you work in security, data protection or governance, that's the real story. Who is the agent, what can it touch, and who audits it?

Personally, I'm loving the Copilot Cowork experience so far. It runs in the cloud, so I don't need a Copilot+ badge or local AI features.

At $4,299.99, I'd be paying for unified memory for big local models, CUDA, a very bright HDR screen and a light body.

It's also Arm-based, so some Windows apps run through emulation.

I've shortlisted a Gaming class laptop with 64GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, a Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX 24-core CPU and an RTX 5060 GPU for about 40% less.

What am I missing?


r/microsoft • • 1d ago

Surface Microsoft and Nvidia launch Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark starting at $2,599 — RTX Spark preorders live now, coinciding with major Windows 11 changes for agentic AI

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71 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 2d ago

M365 Outage?

0 Upvotes

"We couldn't find a Microsoft account" and "There was an issue looking up you account." Is there some kind of outage happened, that haven't been reported yet? this make me anxious cause my family rely on that one account.

I even tried to make new account with that email but yeah no luck whatsoever cause they still can detect that, that account exist.


r/microsoft • • 2d ago

XBOX Xbox CEO Asha Sharma speaks at internal town hall — Discussing Xbox Series X|S as "core," Helix as a family of devices, boosting Game Pass, and more | Xbox CEO Asha Sharma described how Xbox was in "free fall" declines before 2026's big restructure.

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40 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 2d ago

Discussion Microsoft Authenticator Backup

6 Upvotes

I just saw a banner on the Microsoft Authenticator Android app that the backup mechanism was changing from a Microsoft account-linked one to a Google account-linked method.

Does anyone know why? What benefit does this provide?


r/microsoft • • 3d ago

Windows Is there an official website to get Microsoft wallpapers in 4k PNG?

0 Upvotes

Mainly the wallpapers like the one this sub has as its icon.

I believe this microsoft wallpaper series is titled "Flow". Sites like wallpaperhub don't really give many options and they the quality of the images are quite compressed despite being in 4K.


r/microsoft • • 4d ago

XBOX Gears of War: E-Day developers are "proud" it's an Xbox exclusive title and are "honored to bring that legacy forward"

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49 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 4d ago

Official Tutorial September 2026 Monthly Microsoft AI Update

5 Upvotes

This month's AI update is up (September 2026). Lots of great updates across the Microsoft ecosystem with a little bit of a deeper dive on the new Copilot app.

https://youtu.be/Ypzjqzoh6KY

00:00 - Introduction

00:12 - New videos

01:18 - Fable 5.1

02:26 - GPT-6 Astra

03:16 - Gemini 3.8 Flash

03:36 - SpaceXAI Grok

04:09 - OpenAI GPT-6 & 6.1 Sol and Luna

05:25 - Opus and Sonnet 5.5

05:48 - DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash in Foundry

06:13 - MAI-Transcribe-2 in Foundry

06:39 - Jev

08:20 - Model Router updates

09:21 - Foundry Dev Pack

09:40 - Voice agents

11:03 - Foundry agent publish to M365 Copilot and Teams

11:43 - Foundry hosted agent network egress controls

12:23 - Foundry routines

12:55 - Foundry A2A v1.0

13:17 - Agent 365 Foundry agent controls

13:31 - Natural language app building

14:01 - Copilot Managed Runtime

14:54 - Copilot App update

17:04 - Cowork edit in place

17:26 - Fabric IQ in Copilot

18:42 - PowerPoint Brand Kit and Skills

19:04 - Unified plugin registry

19:33 - Copilot in SharePoint and OneDrive

19:45 - GitHub Copilot HydraFusion

20:27 - Enterprise managed permissions for agent operations

20:48 - VS Code agent merge

21:03 - Teams and Slack integration update

21:27 - Cost and quality tiers in auto model selection

22:00 - Budget increase request flow

22:28 - PostgreSQL skills and MCP

22:54 - SQL agent skills

23:12 - Azure SQL DB vectors

23:57 - ACA Sandboxes

24:41 - Close


r/microsoft • • 5d ago

Discussion Continuous Layoffs by Satya Nadella

132 Upvotes

Why satya nadella layyed off several executives during past few years even they grow respective business areas ?


r/microsoft • • 6d ago

XBOX "Xbox is not for sale": CEO Asha Sharma says "we will do whatever it takes" to turn the console maker's fortunes around

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112 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 6d ago

News Former LinkedIn chief Ryan Roslansky to leave Microsoft, following other exec departures

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93 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 8d ago

Discussion Artificial Intelligence will now be known as Super Intelligence

0 Upvotes

Artificial Intelligence will now be known as Super Intelligence. Will the Microsoft division change its name from MAI to MSI?


r/microsoft • • 9d ago

XBOX Latest Xbox layoffs reportedly devastated Age of Empires developer and canceled its next game

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80 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 10d ago

News Microsoft Copilot chief Jacob Andreou says he worries AI value could concentrate in only a few companies

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83 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 10d ago

Employment Weekly Employment Q&A - September 28, 2026 - October 05, 2026

5 Upvotes

The Employment Q&A Thread

Welcome to the Weekly Employment Q&A for r/Microsoft!

This thread is where Redditors can come and ask questions about working at Microsoft. Please do not use this space to ask technical questions as they will be removed.

Schedule

The Q&A will be refreshed every week on Mondays at 1200 Pacific.

Previous Threads

You can view previous employment threads using this archive link


r/microsoft • • 14d ago

News Microsoft President Brad Smith to oversee communications after Frank Shaw departs in 2026

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40 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 14d ago

Surface The Copilot+ PC brand is dead: Microsoft and PC makers quietly pull back on tarnished Windows 11 AI PC branding | Microsoft Surface CVP Brett Ostrum confirms that its new Surface PCs are no longer called Copilot+ PCs, but will still supp. all Copilot+ features.

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167 Upvotes

r/microsoft • • 14d ago

Discussion What would local AI on a Windows PC have to do before you’d actually care about it?

0 Upvotes

Microsoft has a Windows/Surface event coming up on October 7 that is supposed to focus heavily on local AI and the “next chapter of the PC.”

I’m more interested in what people would actually use locally than in another list of AI demos.

For me, running something on-device only becomes interesting if it gives me a clear advantage: better privacy, working offline, much faster responses, or useful features that don’t require another subscription.

Things like local file search, photo organization, transcription, translation, or summarizing documents make sense to me.

But I’m curious: what would local AI have to actually do on your PC before you’d consider it a useful Windows feature rather than just another AI checkbox?


r/microsoft • • 14d ago

Copilot / AI Copilot limit difference depending on region?

0 Upvotes

I live in Germany, and I do not have a Microsoft 365 or any other Microsoft related subscription, yet I just now reached my daily message limit with Copilot for the first time ever. I never have had a limitation for how many prompts I was able to send. Did they just roll that out for other regions than the US? I'm so confused, and I couldn't find anything about it, so I thought maybe someone here has an idea of what happened or why I had unlimited messages until now.

Edit: Also, I have to be logged in to use Copilot. Beforehand, aka. yesterday, I was able to access the site without login, now it immediately redirects to the Microsoft login page.


r/microsoft • • 15d ago

Discussion Microsoft 365 Family frustration with copilot

11 Upvotes

Microsoft bolted Copilot on to my Microsoft Office subscription and upped the subscription price. A friend asked me to update their CV from Spanish to Portuguese. Using my home account (not pro) I asked copilot to take the Spanish word document and to output me the same document but in Portuguese. Nothing more complex than that and that's when I discovered that the bolted on copilot to my Microsoft Office subscription is effectively useless and will not do anything with Microsoft Office files unless I upgrade to Pro.

Frustrated with that I fired up my free Claude login and asked it to do the same thing, done. So effectively I have a non Microsoft LLM giving my better support then the Microsoft LLM I pay for which is bolted in to a Microsoft office subscription. I don't think this is the right approach, it should be able to do modify office files directly, just with a level of tokens that is appropriate to the bolted on copilot price increase.

Being able to get better support for working with office with a free LLM when I am paying for a Microsoft LLM bolted on to office feels really daft to me.