Well, what a week. Let's get into it.
1. Too big to care
This was the week when the world found out that "the cloud" means "the global economy's single point of failure". Microsoft 365 was down for about a day in more than 70 countries, taking out Outlook, Teams and Copilot.
Cory Doctorow has been pointing out that putting so many eggs in a single basket has been a terrible mistake for longer than some of you will have been using the internet. And when that basket is a convicted monopolist that spent over $30bn on buybacks and cut staff, then couldn't keep its servers up, it's probably time for Microsoft to be broken up -- as it should have been years ago.
Of course, Microsoft has raced to say that it was nothing to do with AI, but what it means by that is that AI-created code didn't fail. And it's most likely right! While a lot of people oppose AI coding, most of the programmers I've spoken to like it. When used well, it lets you code faster and – importantly – find bugs faster.
But when we talk about AI, we're not just talking about the code itself. Business adoption of AI comes with a vast array of impacts, particularly on Microsoft. The company has committed to spending $190bn on capital expenditure in 2026, largely driven by AI, which, in a word, means big datacentres. Even for a business which generates billions in free cash flow every quarter, that's a lot of money.
And of course, that money can't come from the company's profits, which need to be maintained to ensure that its shareholders stay happy.
So instead, Microsoft has to cut costs. And given the increased efficiency (on paper) that AI unlocks, where better to cut than your staff costs?
Hence, its recent "voluntary exit offer", the second one of the year. We used to call these "voluntary redundancy" and they can be great for experienced (and so expensive) staff who want to retire a little early. My dad took advantage of one to retire when he was the same age I am now, and he loved the extra five years he got spending more time with his family.
On the face of it, they are also great for the business. Experienced staff tend to be the most expensive. It also opens up promotion opportunities for younger employees, who perhaps have seen their careers stall because there's been no opening to promote them into. Handled well, these can be good for both the business and employees.
But -- and it's a big but -- you also lose decades of experience, and in tech that means a lot of knowledge about how some incredibly complex systems work. Although code gets documented, it tends to be about what the code does: why it does it is a different story, and it's one which mostly lives inside the shared knowledge that forms part of a company's tech culture.
When that knowledge is lost from a single person, it can be difficult. When you're "exiting" thousands of senior staff, it becomes a case of hollowing out the business. And that, unfortunately, is what seems to have happened at Microsoft.
2. The man in the leather jacket leaves the building
Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after an affair with Megaspeed executive Alice Huang, whom US officials suspect of links to Chinese intelligence. Charlie Warzel argues DC and the Valley closed ranks because all the AI money flows through Nvidia. This made people turn a blind eye to both the affair with Huang (Ms) and Nvidia's profitable side hustle of looking the other way as its chips ended up in China.
The second point is more important, and it goes to the highest level. According to the NYT (via Daring Fireball) the Commerce Department's investigation into Megaspeed smuggling Nvidia chips into China was taken away from its investigators after Nvidia's general counsel name-dropped a Trump appointee. This is how business is done in America now.
So the world's most important company turns out to have the governance of a 1970s rock band camped out in the Chateau Marmont. The people now saying "nothing to see here", like David Sacks, also told us China was such a threat that we needed infinite data centres.
3. Rules are for the little people (copyright edition)
You might remember that people have been using Claude and Codex to unbrick IoT kit and strip surveillance ads off smart TVs. Now they are hitting safety blocks and account restrictions in their AI tools, which an OpenAI engineer calls "mostly accidental". Sure.
It appears that getting round copyright is fine when an AI firm hoovers up the whole internet – that's "progress". But it magically becomes "cyber abuse" when you do it to stop your telly spying on you. It looks like, in the future, owning your own stuff will depend on local, open-weight models.
4. The best thing that happened this week
M John Harrison won the Booker Prize, which is a long-overdue recognition of Britain's best living writer. I've loved Mike's works for a long time. I first picked up The Centauri Device (a book he hates) on holiday in Spain, aged 10, as the only English-language SF book in a newsagent's rack.
It was not, really, a book for a ten-year-old. And it made a long-lasting impression.
What's the connection with tech? Well, because in his 2020 book The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (which you should read), MJH has this:
"Perfectly sound pivots, such as 'however' or 'while it remains true that', connected propositions empty of any actual meaning, as if the writer had learned to mimic sentence structure without having any idea how to link it to its own content."
That is the best description of untrained LLM writing I have read, and it predates the rise of ChatGPT.
5. The crisis in entry-level employment
Normally, in a situation like the one described above where Microsoft is letting go older workers, you would see an increase in entry-level jobs. Not this time.
Instead, in the UK (and I suspect everywhere) entry-level jobs for graduates are vanishing, with it becoming common for young people to apply for hundreds of roles without even a reply from a human being. The ladder hasn't just been pulled up -- it's been replaced by a chatbot.
6. Fred has joined the meeting. And your inbox. And your phone
Fireflies has long been one of the best AI meeting recorders, second in my book only to Granola. But being an excellent single-use tool isn't enough for investors. Hence its recent keynote announcing all the cool things it's up to.
There's some good stuff in here, from an email assistant that categorises and drafts replies to emails to Plaud-like hardware which can record face-to-face meetings without you even having to think about it.
Fireflies' CEO is clear that "the goal isn't to replace your team", but these are the exact kind of tasks which were often allocated to people in entry-level roles of the kind that we are seeing eliminated. And those tasks also helped new employees orient themselves and learn the "lore" which underpins all organisational culture.
7. Wile E. Coyote finally looks down
Hyperscaler stocks are down 27% from their peak, and the Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman says a burst AI bubble "will almost surely cause a recession", probably worse than the dot-com slump.
The dot-com slump and the 2008 crash both took place when companies, governments and societies had more wealth and resilience than they do now. In 2026, we have had a decade and a half of austerity measures, wealth accumulating in the hands of fewer individuals, and, of course, a pandemic. Because of this, the bursting of an AI-related bubble and its accompanying recession could well be worse than either of those events.
The AI industry promised to end work. It may yet, via the traditional route of a recession. Buckle up kids.
8. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM (and that's the problem)
The contracts for big IT projects always go to big IT companies. That makes sense -- they are best equipped to handle them -- but the number of companies capable of delivering the biggest ones is a low single digit number.
Hence, the EU's Entry/Exit System launched three years late at double the budget and still causing hours-long queues. So much so that now, the EU is suing IBM and other contractors for their failure to deliver a working system.
And here's the problem: Even when Europe does buy European, as with Atos and Leonardo here, it gets the same handful of giant integrators and the same results.
It's the other side of the coin from the Microsoft outage, which saw general shouty outrage from European politicians including Emmanuel Macron, who proclaimed "our independence cannot be outsourced." Yet, it has been, and digging ourselves out of that is a decades-long project.
9. Foot on the accelerator, eyes firmly shut
"Minister for growth" Dan Tomlinson says the UK will push on with data centres. Former technology secretary Liz Kendall adds that "if you're in a race and someone in the lead falters … you put your foot on the accelerator."
Meanwhile, of course, US voters have turned decisively against them. It appears that the UK's post-Brexit growth strategy hinges on taking on projects that no one else wants. That sounds like a winner to me!
10. Something wonderful to close
LiDAR Lens is a free tool which overlays 1m LiDAR scans over aerial photos of Britain. There's a "low sun" setting, which makes it much easier to pick out earthworks.
No account required, no AI needed or used, just your local Iron Age hill fort hiding in plain sight. This is what the web was made for.