
Microsoft
Global software and cloud giant; Azure, M365, Intune; DMA probe and US cloud sovereignty risk.
On 28 August, Singapore’s cyber agency warned of two actively exploited SharePoint Server flaws and urged immediate patching, placing Microsoft’s on-premises collaboration software under fresh pressure.
Last refreshed: 24 September 2026 · Appears in 5 active topics
Microsoft admitted to the French Senate it cannot guarantee French data stays in France: what does that mean for its European cloud business?
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UK Startups and InnovationBackground
Across enterprise estates, Microsoft supplies Azure cloud services, Microsoft 365 productivity software, Teams collaboration tools, Intune device management and GitHub developer services. Incidents involving Teams, Intune and GitHub have shown how those products can each become part of a customer’s security exposure .
Corporate customers often use Microsoft across productivity, infrastructure, communications, device control, source code and security operations. That breadth makes identity controls, patching, data jurisdiction and service resilience recurring concerns rather than isolated product decisions.
Microsoft’s position in enterprise technology gives its cloud and workplace products wide operational importance. Procurement choices can therefore turn questions about legal control, local hosting and supplier concentration into decisions about an organisation’s core systems.
Microsoft’s servers face repeated patch alarms
Singapore’s cyber agency warned on 28 August that two actively exploited SharePoint Server flaws, scored 9.1 and 8.1, required immediate patches. The warning concerned software that customers run on their own servers, leaving Microsoft to supply fixes while each customer must apply them across its estate.
CISA added two further exploited SharePoint deserialisation flaws to its catalogue on 16 and 22 July, the third such listing in three weeks. For Microsoft, the sequence makes patch delivery and customer maintenance central to confidence in its on-premises collaboration products.
Microsoft loses a French cloud reference
France awarded its Health Data Hub contract to Scaleway on 23 April, with millions of health records due to leave Microsoft Azure from late 2026 or early 2027 if the French provider secures certification. The decision removed a prominent French public-sector reference from Microsoft’s cloud portfolio.
On 15 April, the Open Rights Group cited the US CLOUD Act and Microsoft’s earlier email shutdown for sanctioned individuals when arguing that UK data held by US firms faces jurisdictional risk. Microsoft’s public-sector prospects now depend partly on whether buyers accept that legal exposure.
Microsoft cuts jobs amid transformation
Microsoft told investors on 29 April that total company headcount would fall year on year in 2027, alongside 20 million paid Copilot seats and expanding capital spending. The forecast tied workforce planning to a company-wide push to sell and deploy new productivity tools.
On 6 July, Microsoft cut 4,800 roles, about 2.1% of its workforce, while chief people officer Amy Coleman described the changes as part of an AI-driven transformation and denied that the technology had directly replaced those roles. That distinction leaves Microsoft’s own employment choices under continued scrutiny.