The day Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the company’s “planet-scale cloud and AI factory”, Azure cloud – the IT infrastructure underpinning this – was offline for more than eight hours.
According to the company’s latest quarterly results, Microsoft Cloud revenue surpassed $49bn, an increase of 26% compared to the same quarter last year.
Overall, Microsoft posted revenue for $78bn, up 18%. “We are seeing increasing demand and diffusion of our AI platform and family of Copilots, which is fueling our investments across both capital and talent,” Nadella said during the earnings call.
Nadella said that Microsoft now has 900 million monthly active users of AI features across its products. The company reported an increase in capital expenditures to $35bn, driven by growing demand for its cloud and AI offerings.
Chief financial officer Amy Hood said: “This quarter, roughly half of our spend was on short-lived assets, primarily GPUs [graphics processor units] and CPUs [central processor units], to support increasing Azure platform demand, growing first-party apps and AI solutions, accelerating R&D by our product teams, as well as continued replacement for end-of-life server and networking equipment.”
There is also longer term expenditure, which includes $11bn of finance leases that are primarily for large datacentre sites.
Speaking about the company’s need to buy more CPUs and GPUs, Hood admitted Azure would be “capacity constrained”, adding: “We will continue to balance Azure revenue growth with the growing needs across our first-party apps and AI solutions, our own R&D efforts and the end of life server replacements. Therefore, we now expect to be capacity constrained through at least the end of our fiscal year.”
As workloads pivot from CPUs to GPUs, Hood acknowledged has meant the company has struggled to keep pace. “We’ve been short now for many quarters. I thought we were going to catch up – we are not. Demand is increasing. It is not increasing in just one place, it is increasing across many places,” Hood added.
Commenting on the Microsoft results, Forrester’s principal analyst Tracy Woo said: “Microsoft delivered on expectations, but its level of AI investment is cause for concern. Average enterprise AI spend is significantly lower than expected – due in part to limited production-ready use cases. This will change, but resizes the question of whether Microsoft has invested too heavily and too early in AI.
“For now, the company is benefiting from the AI hype, and cloud revenue has made considerable gains to AWS revenue in recent years is promising as Azure becomes a major revenue engine for Microsoft.”
Just a few hours prior to the earnings call, around 15:45 in the UK, the Microsoft cloud experienced an outage, which affected customers globally including a number of major retailers in the UK.
The company said that the root cause of the outage was “an inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door [AFD]”. This triggered a widespread service disruption affecting its Azure customers whose IT uses AFD for global content delivery.
“The change introduced an invalid or inconsistent configuration state that caused a significant number of AFD nodes to fail to load properly, leading to increased latencies, timeouts and connection errors for downstream services,” Microsoft said.
OpenAI’s chief communications officer, Hannah Wong, announced internally on Monday that she is leaving the company in January, WIRED has learned. In a statement to WIRED, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed the departure.
“Hannah has played a defining role in shaping how people understand OpenAI and the work we do,” said CEO Sam Altman and CEO of applications Fidji Simo in a joint statement. “She has an extraordinary ability to bring clarity to complex ideas, and to do it with care and grace. We’re deeply grateful for her leadership and partnership these last five years, and we wish her the very best.”
Wong joined OpenAI in 2021 when it was a relatively small research lab, and has led the company’s communications team as ChatGPT has grown into one of the world’s largest consumer products. She was considered instrumental in leading the company through the PR crisis that was Altman’s brief ouster and re-hiring in 2023—a period the company internally calls “the blip.” Wong assumed the chief communications officer role in August 2024, and has expanded the company’s communications team since then.
In a drafted LinkedIn post shared with WIRED, Wong said that OpenAI’s VP of communications, Lindsey Held, will lead the company’s communications team until a new chief communications officer is hired. OpenAI’s VP of marketing, Kate Rouch, is leading the search for Wong’s replacement.
“These years have been intense and deeply formative,” said Wong in the LinkedIn post. “I’m grateful I got to help tell OpenAI’s story, introduce ChatGPT and other incredible products to the world, and share more about the people forging the path to AGI during an extraordinary moment of growth and momentum.”
Wong says she looks forward to spending more time with her husband and kids as she figures out the next chapter in her career.
The UK government has launched a Women in Tech Taskforce, designed to dismantle the current barriers faced by women working in, or wanting to work in, the tech sector.
Made up of several experts from the technology ecosystem, the taskforce’s main aim is to boost economic growth, after the recent government-backed Lovelace report found the UK is suffering an annual loss of between £2bn and £3.5bn as a result of women leaving the tech sector or changing roles.
The UK’s technology secretary, Liz Kendall, said: “Technology should work for everyone. That is why I have established the Women in Tech Taskforce, to break down the barriers that still hold too many people back, and to partner with industry on practical solutions that make a real difference.
“This matters deeply to me. When women are inspired to take on a role in tech and have a seat at the table, the sector can make more representative decisions, build products that serve everyone, and unlock the innovation and growth our economy needs.”
The percentage of women in the technology workforce remains at around 22%, having grown marginally over the past five years, and the recent Lovelace report found between 40,000 and 60,000 women are leaving digital roles each year, whether for other tech roles or to leave tech for good.
When women are inspired to take on a role in tech and have a seat at the table, the sector can make more representative decisions, build products that serve everyone, and unlock the innovation and growth our economy needs Liz Kendall, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
There are many reasons for this, one being the lack of opportunity to advance their career in their current roles. Research by other organisations has found a lack of flexibility at work and bias also play a part in either preventing women from joining the sector or contributing to their decision to leave IT.
The issues can be traced all the way to school-aged girls, who often choose not to continue with technology subjects. One reason for this is that misconceptions about the skills needed for a tech role make young women feel the sector isn’t for them.
Headed up by the founder and CEO of Stemettes, Anne-Marie Imafidon, the founding members of the taskforce include:
Liz Kendall, secretary of state for science, innovation and technology.
Anne-Marie Imafidon, founder of Stemettes; Women in Tech Envoy.
Allison Kirkby, CEO, BT Group.
Anna Brailsford, CEO and co-founder, Code First Girls.
Francesca Carlesi, CEO, Revolut.
Louise Archer, academic, Institute of Education.
Karen Blake, tech inclusion strategist; former co-CEO of the Tech Talent Charter.
Hayaatun Sillem, CEO, Royal Academy of Engineering.
Kate Bell, assistant general secretary, TUC.
Amelia Miller, co-founder and CEO, ivee.
Ismini Vasileiou, director, East Midlands Cyber Security Cluster.
Emma O’Dwyer, director of public policy, Uber.
These experts will help the government “identify and dismantle” the barriers preventing women from joining or staying in the tech sector across the areas of education, training and career progression.
They will also advise on how to support and grow diversity in the UK’s tech ecosystem and replicate the success of organisations that already have an even gender split in their tech remits.
Collaboration has been heavily pinpointed in the past as being the only way sustained change can be developed when it comes to diversity in tech, with the taskforce working on advising the government on policy, while also consulting on how government, the tech industry and education providers can work together to make it easier to increase and maintain the number of women in tech.
The taskforce will work in tandem with other government initiatives aimed at encouraging women and young people into technology careers, such as the recently launched TechFirst skills programme and the Regional Tech Booster programme, among others.
The first meeting of the Women in Tech Taskforce took place on 15 December 2025.
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