Tom Warren is a Senior Correspondent and author of Notepad. Tom previously founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge. Tom also used to work as an enterprise project manager in a variety of investment banks, and has a background in IT and Windows engineering. Tom has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC News, Channel 4, MSNBC, TWiT, and many others over the years. You can reach Tom confidentially on Signal here.
Microsoft’s annual report reveals the company employed around 223,000 people as of June 30th. That’s 5,000 less than the 228,000 people employed in 2025. It’s the first time Microsoft has had a headcount reduction in 10 years, after the gutting of the Nokia phone business in 2015 and 2016. The reduction comes as Microsoft has laid off more than 9,000 employees over the past year.
[Microsoft]
Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has been “cooking up retro vibes” as part of Microsoft’s new Xbox Labs effort. The result is what looks like a vibecoded option to pick your dashboard on an Xbox console. This is simply an experiment right now and it’s not clear if we’ll ever see such an option, but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma asks “blades on the web. Do we like this experiment?”
Google says “a power event” created an outage for some of its cloud servers this morning. The power problem has now been resolved, and services should be coming back online. That’s good news for Revolut and other services that were impacted by the Google Cloud problems.
[Google Cloud]
Popular European banking app Revolut is experiencing a major outage this morning. Revolut users are unable to make card payments, access funds, or sign into its mobile app. “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” says an unnamed Revolut spokesperson to BBC News, adding that “all our customers’ money and data are safe.” Revolut’s issues started just before 9AM UK (4AM ET), after a Google Cloud power problem affected multiple services.
[Revolut]
