Tech Express | November 13, 2026: Microsoft's Teams, Outlook and Copilot Hit by Global Outage Across 74 Countries

1. Microsoft's Teams, Outlook and Copilot Hit by Global Outage Across 74 Countries

Source: BBC

Several Microsoft services, including Teams, Outlook and Copilot, suffered a large-scale "connectivity issue," affecting tens of thousands of users worldwide, with reports from the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. According to BBC, the disruption also hit connections to AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic that integrate with Microsoft systems.

Microsoft said on X that the cause was multiple servers becoming "unexpectedly unavailable," putting pressure on the remaining systems. The company said repairs had produced "positive results" but warned that some restored services "may become unresponsive again" and that customers in "any region" could be affected. Data from monitoring site Downdetector showed the outage reached 74 countries within about an hour; around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, global reports of Outlook problems peaked at nearly 140,000, more than 2,000 times the normal level.

Downdetector said the problem had lasted at least eight hours and was first detected shortly after 16:15 GMT on Thursday. According to Microsoft's website, more than 430 million people worldwide use Microsoft 365 apps, and tracking platforms estimate the number of companies using them at between 3 million and 4 million. Users currently cannot view email or files, but messaging and online meetings are largely working. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which had been due to report third-quarter results on November 12, postponed the release to November 16 because of the disruption.

Source

2. Huang Renxun Resigns: Nvidia Shares Plunge 14% as AMD and Broadcom Gain

Source: Nikkei Chinese

In U.S. trading on November 12, shares of semiconductor giant Nvidia at one point fell 14% from the previous day. According to Nikkei Chinese, Nvidia announced before the market opened on November 12 that CEO Jensen Huang was resigning suddenly amid suspicions he was involved in a scandal, raising market concerns about the company's growth strategy.

After trading opened at 9:30 a.m. local time, selling surged and the stock at one point dropped into the $148 range, its lowest level since June 2025, roughly a year and four months ago. Once the selling eased, bargain buying appeared and the decline narrowed slightly. Nvidia's stock is now more than 30% below the record high it set in October.

The slump weighed on the broader market: the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite opened down more than 1%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) fell as much as 4%. But chip stocks did not fall across the board — rival AMD and Broadcom posted notable gains. Nikkei noted that Huang not only led chip development but also drove partnerships with customers and made huge investments in AI-related companies; the departure of the charismatic leader who built the company could shake Nvidia's position.

3. Bessent Says Chinese AI Models Were Involved in French Supermarket Fridge Attack

Source: Lianhe Zaobao

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation on November 12 that Chinese large AI models were involved in the cyberattack on French supermarket refrigerators. According to Bloomberg, Bessent said: "I don't know if any of you saw those refrigerators in France and the 150 grocery stores that were shut down. It was a Chinese model. That's about as bad as it gets — the Iranians using a Chinese model. Isn't that just the way of the world?"

Last month's cyberattack affected about 700 French supermarkets and the French public blood bank, disabling refrigeration systems and forcing grocers and retailers to throw away spoiled food. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot confirmed at a G7 foreign ministers' meeting in Paris on November 9 that the attack was carried out by Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Supermarket refrigeration systems in Belgium, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and Estonia also reported cyberattacks.

According to Lianhe Zaobao, the attack was carried out through internet-connected centralized refrigerator controllers that allow contractors to monitor temperatures remotely; attackers breached some systems and altered settings, triggering long defrost cycles that raised refrigerator and freezer temperatures. Bessent warned that China's AI models "are dangerous because they have no guardrails." He will travel to Asia with President Trump next week, when Trump plans to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Source

4. Google and Samsung's Android XR Smart Glasses Go on Sale From $395

Source: WIRED

Nearly two years after the two companies first announced the Android XR platform, Google and Samsung's smart glasses have finally arrived. The product, called "Intelligent Eyewear," pairs Samsung's hardware with Google handling much of the software platform, while eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster handle design and fit.

The first models are available for preorder now, with official sales starting December 10. Warby Parker frames start at $395 in three styles — Alden, Reid and Wren — as optical or sunglasses; Gentle Monster's glasses start at $449 in six designs with various colors and tints. The hardware is identical across both brands: about 41 grams, 10 grams lighter than Meta's new Gen 3 glasses, nine hours of battery life and a charging case that can recharge the glasses up to seven times.

The glasses have a 12-megapixel camera with an LED indicator that shows people nearby when you are recording; a button captures photos and videos of up to 90 seconds at up to 3K resolution, and a touch-sensitive temple activates the Gemini assistant. They are the first devices to support the "Hey Gemini" hotword, though "Hey Google" also works. Compatibility is limited: Pixel 7 or newer, Galaxy S or Z Fold running One UI 9.0 or higher, and iPhone 13 Pro or newer.

Source

5. OpenAI Launches Two Security Products, Is Sued by Nonprofits the Same Day

Source: The Register

OpenAI has launched two new security products, one for penetration testing and one for defense, and warned organizations that their businesses are only safe if they use tools like these. "We're now at a point where companies will be secure only to the extent of the frontier model that they use to defend themselves and how well they utilize that," OpenAI President Greg Brockman said during a Thursday keynote address.

The two products, Daybreak Red Team and Daybreak Defense Factory, are both part of OpenAI's Daybreak security platform. Red Team, available in early access, uses OpenAI models to test companies' web applications for vulnerabilities; Nancy Wang, who leads cyber-applied AI, described it as "superhuman pen-test at the scale of automated continuous scanning." It also helps validate vulnerabilities reported by code scanners, bug bounty programs and disclosure reports, and then tests the patches.

Defense Factory automates the "defensive loop," using agents built on OpenAI's latest cyber models — currently GPT-6 Cyber — to scan organizations' codebases, hunt for vulnerabilities and develop patches, with engineers reviewing and approving fixes before they go into production. On the same day, Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and The Alliance for Secure AI sued OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX's AI businesses in San Francisco Superior Court, asking a judge to stop them from developing or deploying AI systems more capable than their most advanced existing models. The lawsuit cites incidents including OpenAI agents accessing Hugging Face and gaining unauthorized access to an Australian government portal containing Medicare statistics.

Source

6. NASA Plans $20 Billion Moon Base Over Seven Years

Source: The National Desk

NASA announced a plan to build a $20 billion moon base over the next seven years and to start sending astronauts to the moon every six months after the Artemis V mission in 2028. According to The National Desk, the plan was presented at NASA's "Ignition" event at its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Jared Isaacman told members of Congress and representatives of 35 countries at the event: "The clock is running in this great-power competition, and success or failure will be measured in months, not years." He said Artemis IV and Artemis V are now both scheduled to launch in 2028, which he said is important to beating China: "This time, the goal is not flags and footprints. This time, the goal is to stay."

Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA's Moon Base program executive, said NASA is shifting away from its prior plan to build a space station in lunar orbit called Gateway and will instead "focus on building the moon base," repurposing Gateway's systems and hardware to accelerate progress. Construction will proceed in three phases: build, test, learn; early infrastructure; and long-term presence. In the first phase, NASA and its commercial partners will regularly send rovers, instruments and technology to the moon to test power, mobility, communications, scientific tools and navigation.

Source

7. Actress Zhao Liying Sues Hongguo and Douyin Over AI-Generated Face

Source: ThePaper.cn

Actress Zhao Liying has filed a portrait-rights lawsuit against Beijing Bimo Liuxiang Technology, the operator of the Hongguo short-drama platform, its wholly owned shareholder Beijing Douyin Information Service, and an individual named Shi, bringing the case to the Mentougou District People's Court in Beijing. According to ThePaper, the case was heard via cloud court on November 10 and has not yet been decided.

Zhao's side argues that some short dramas on Hongguo used face-swapping and face-merging AI technology to combine her facial features into characters without permission, and even used her likeness as a drama cover for commercial traffic. The core dispute is therefore whether an AI-generated face can be legally recognized as Zhao Liying's portrait.

This is not the first such controversy for Hongguo. Public reports show that the likenesses of actors including Jackson Yee, Deng Wei, Yang Zi, Xiao Zhan and Cheng Yi had previously been used by AI short dramas on the platform through face-swapping or synthesis, with the disputes peaking between March and April 2026. Hongguo published a special governance notice on April 6, 2026, saying it had completed a full review of 15,000 works and handled 670 violating works, while 1,718 violating animated dramas were taken down in the first quarter. You Yunting, a senior partner at Shanghai Dabang Law Firm, said the key test is not whether the face is identical but whether it is identifiable: "If it can be recognized by the general public or a specific industry group, it should be deemed to have used that person's portrait."

Source

8. Meta's Muse Can Now Make Calls for You, but Only for Paying Users

Source: TechCrunch

After initially testing the feature in September, Meta's consumer AI agent Muse can now place calls to U.S. businesses on behalf of its users. According to TechCrunch, only paid subscribers have access to the feature.

Meta said last month that Muse now has over 10 million users. Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer and head of its Superintelligence Labs division, said the feature could be used to take care of calls people don't want to make, such as those to their cable company, the DMV, or a restaurant that doesn't offer online reservations. Previously only a select number of early adopters could try it after asking for access; now anyone who pays for Muse can make this type of request.

Muse subscription plans start at $20 per month for 500 million tokens per week, while heavier users can pay $100 per month for 3 billion tokens. Muse is not the only AI agent able to place calls — startup Instinct and Google's Gemini offer similar options. But the article notes that the reception on the other end of the line can be mixed, with many businesses and receptionists hanging up as soon as they identify that it isn't a human.

Source

9. Researcher Unlocks Mining Card With Voltage Fault Injection: 8GB of VRAM Becomes 80GB

Source: 3DM

A researcher known as Kate used voltage fault injection to unlock the disabled memory and compute units on an Nvidia CMP 170HX mining card, turning a card rated at 8GB of VRAM into an A100-class compute card with 80GB. The CMP 170HX is an Nvidia mining product that uses the same GA100 GPU as the data-center A100 but ships with many hardware features disabled.

This was not a matter of soldering on new memory chips, but of re-enabling HBM memory that already existed inside the card but had been blocked. Kate said the 8GB version actually packages about 80GB of HBM, while a 10GB version packages about 40GB. Software tools had previously been able to raise the usable VRAM of some CMP 170HX cards to 64GB, but could not fully remove limits on compute units and the PCIe interface.

Kate targeted the e-fuse controller inside the GPU that configures hardware features, using voltage fault injection to bypass write restrictions and then modifying the configuration. Of 10 8GB cards tested, nine successfully enabled the full 80GB of VRAM, while one could only use 64GB; some modified cards also regained PCIe 4.0 and NVLink. In an OpenCL FP16 FMA test, one unlocked card reached about 85.9 TFLOPS, above the roughly 72.5 TFLOPS the researcher measured on an A100. The researcher said the issue was disclosed to Nvidia's product security team before publication and warned that the modification carries a risk of damaging the card and is not suitable for ordinary users.

10. Switch 2 Drops to $469, Its Lowest Price in Months

Source: 9to5Google

The Nintendo Switch 2 has dropped to $469 in a Woot sale, its lowest price in months. According to 9to5Google, it is the lowest price seen since Nintendo announced price increases in May.

Woot held a sale the previous night with deep discounts for new customers, and it is now open to everyone, though supplies are quite limited. The article notes that with high demand for the Switch 2 this holiday season and higher electronics prices across the board, this may be the best chance to get a discounted Switch 2 this year. It also mentions that Dbrand's Killswitch case for the Switch 2 is currently $30 off.

Source