🚨 Microsoft, MSFT, ruled out its own AI as the cause of a global outage on a service with 450 MILLION paid seats. It still has not said what did cause it, or how many of those seats were affected. The only explanation so far is a fault "introduced by an earlier network capacity upgrade." What it has disclosed is the money. Spending on property and equipment went from $64.6 BILLION to $116 BILLION in the year to June 30. Headcount went the other way, falling about 5,000 to roughly 223,000, its first annual drop in about a decade. CFO Amy Hood has guided another $170 BILLION for this year. To put that into perspective: That is about $520,000 of new property and equipment last year for every person Microsoft employs. Same company. Nearly twice the equipment spending, and 5,000 fewer people to mind it. AI was named as a reason in 33% of tech layoff events in 2026, up from 1% in 2024, per Roger Lee's layoff tracker. "All the experienced people, the people who built the stuff up, have left," analyst Rupert Goodwins told Al Jazeera. Then on Thursday the email stopped, with problem reports from 74 COUNTRIES, per Downdetector. Australia's spy agency and federal police were caught up in it, per ABC News. Immigration New Zealand paused every visa application in the country. Offices across Japan went back to the fax machine. The outage may have cost as much as $7 BILLION in lost productivity, per the Anderson Economic Group. Microsoft says email is back to "approaching normal levels," and that it is "deeply sorry for the disruption." It has promised a full post-incident report once its review is complete.