Desk
Big tech, startups, earnings, regulation and policy — the decisions that shape the products.
Stories on this desk are written by Hitechreports’s automated newsroom from the sources credited on each piece. Bylines are desk signatures, not individual journalists.
Signatures used by this desk: The Ledger, Market Close
Outlook is back. But Indian businesses on Microsoft 365 Business or Exchange Online may be owed bill credits — if they file before December 31.
Microsoft 365 is down globally — Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, and Xbox all affected — with no estimated time for recovery. Japan’s government IT infrastructure failed alongside it.
Microsoft will turn on Anthropic's Claude models in Microsoft 365 Copilot by default for UK business tenants on December 9 — unless admins manually disable or restrict it first. EU tenants remain opt-in only. No change for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plans.
Microsoft Outlook outage November 12, 2026: Business customers can claim service credits — up to 50% of their monthly bill — under Microsoft’s SLA. Personal users get nothing.
Microsoft 365 is back online after a 24-hour global outage that knocked out Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and other core services across more than 70 countries.
ChatGPT is rolling out verified Business Agents — AI representatives for companies that users can talk to directly inside the app. The feature launches first for US-based ecommerce and online service businesses, with no global rollout date announced.
Anthropic has launched Claude Meetings, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Sheets — its first full suite of office tools — in beta for paid users in India and the US, as part of a broader push ahead of its expected IPO.
OpenAI has launched a Business Hub for ChatGPT — a beta feature that lets companies create verified profiles, deploy AI agents to answer customer questions, and track how users engage with their brand inside the app.
Sashikumar Sreedharan, ex-Google Cloud India MD, joins Sarvam as President and CBO — overseeing enterprise, government, and partner strategy. No pricing, no product launch, no mention of Google Cloud Run.
Cat Wu, head of product for Claude Code at Anthropic, has joined OpenAI to lead its Core Products team — the unit behind Codex — just weeks before Anthropic’s planned IPO.
Apple has confirmed the iPhone Duo remains supply-constrained — with no clear end in sight. Ship dates for online orders now stretch into January 2027, and Apple’s COO Sabih Khan told investors on Monday’s earnings call: “It’s really hard to predict when supply and demand will be in balance.”
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team says an internal Claude model generated working exploits for five major platforms. All flaws are now patched. No public Claude version is affected. Claude AI remains free in India; Pro costs ₹1,299/month.
Claude Code now blocks developers from recreating games—even for clients who own the physical or intellectual rights—according to multiple reports filed on its public GitHub tracker since late October.
Netflix’s India revenue grew 18% YoY in Q3 2026. Its biggest driver? Lock Upp — a daily reality show that outperformed every other title on the platform in viewing hours. The shift marks a strategic retreat from urban-only originals toward mass-appeal formats, regional language rollouts and licensed Bollywood hits — all priced against JioHotstar’s ₹79 monthly plan and Amazon’s 55-new-originals bet
Anthropic has struck a new deal with the US General Services Administration giving federal, state, local and tribal governments a 40% discount on Claude, replacing an earlier $1 pilot program that expires October 31.
The FCC approved the transfer of 25 MHz of mobile-satellite spectrum on Tuesday. Amazon plans commercial direct-to-device service by year end. Apple's emergency features stay intact under a side agreement.
A trojanized version of the official Claude Code extension lived in Cursor's IDE marketplace for roughly 11 hours on Thursday. Cursor says at most 5,000 users downloaded it. The malware contained a backdoor but a coding error prevented it from fully installing on the vast majority of machines. Anthropic confirms its own infrastructure was not compromised.
Apple raised prices across iPhones and MacBooks this year partly because flash memory costs have jumped roughly fivefold since 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing TechInsights data, as AI hyperscalers outbid Apple for supply.
Microsoft broke with years of practice and disclosed Azure's actual quarterly revenue for the first time: $33.2 billion, up 48%. It also revealed OpenAI alone accounted for $10 billion of its total sales.
Texas has sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing them of misleading users about ChatGPT's safety for minors and violating state consumer-protection and child-privacy law. The state wants age verification, parental consent and a court-approved review of future models.
A Federal Court of Australia ruling forces Apple to open iPhones to rival app stores and sideloading from March 2027, bars extra fees on alternative payment systems, and brought Fortnite back to the App Store immediately.
Apple Operations India earned ₹650 crore from software development and global support work in FY26, pushing its total revenue past ₹1,400 crore as manufacturing support income nearly doubled.
The UK government is funding a £100 million AI Biosecurity Lab to spot biological threats early, with OpenAI and Anthropic kicking in up to £200 million combined in compute and model access rather than money.
Rhode Island has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Meta, alleging the company knowingly let scam ads run on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and profited from them despite claiming otherwise.
Microsoft and Japanese police took down a phishing-as-a-service operation blamed for more than a billion scam messages, fake Amazon pages and stolen logins across 150 countries, seizing the domains behind it.
An Australian federal judge has ordered Apple to let iPhone users install apps from third-party stores and websites starting March 1, 2027, following a long antitrust fight with Epic Games. Apple says it will appeal.
OpenAI and Google Cloud said GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna and the Codex coding agent are rolling out in private preview, with wider availability expected in the coming weeks, as enterprise customers get a new way to buy OpenAI's tools.
Loop Capital downgraded Apple from Buy to Hold, cutting its price target to $330 after concluding that millions of lost iPhone shipments won't be made up in 2027, even as unit volumes are forecast to rise.
Google has released TorchTPU, an open-source version of PyTorch built for its own AI chips, a day after Amazon shipped a similar tool for Trainium, both aimed at loosening Nvidia's hold on AI development.
Anthropic and Nscale are negotiating a second $45 billion compute deal — just weeks after closing their first one. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, reports the talks are advanced but not final.