Microsoft Corp, which is struggling to bring data centers online fast enough to meet the demand for its artificial intelligence products, hired one of the engineering chiefs who kept Facebook’s infrastructure humming. 

Jay Parikh will join the senior leadership team and report to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive officer. 

“There are very few leaders in our industry with Jay’s experience in leading teams through the rapid growth and scale required to support today’s largest internet businesses,” Nadella said Thursday in an internal email, which the Redmond, Washington-based company also posted on its corporate blog. 

Parikh, who most recently ran cloud security startup Lacework, previously led engineering at Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc. Nadella said the company would share details on Parikh’s role in “the next few months.”

A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t immediately comment beyond the CEO’s note.

Parikh joined Facebook in 2009 and spent more than a decade there, working on technical infrastructure and data center projects that helped the company grow into the world’s largest social network. 

Meta broke ground on more than a dozen data centers around the world while Parikh was there. As many technology companies unplugged their own data centers in favor of rented computing power from Microsoft or Amazon.com Inc., Meta remained one of the few companies capable of building cutting-edge server farms at a massive scale. 

Parikh oversaw several other technical projects, including Meta’s efforts in subsea cables and its ill-fated Aquila drone project intended to beam wireless internet down to rural places in the US.

Microsoft, which operates subsea cable and data center design projects of its own, is increasingly focused on infrastructure projects that can help it wring greater power and efficiency from its network. Thanks largely to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Microsoft is at the forefront of the effort to build tools that rely on generative artificial intelligence. The company is racing to build data centers and chips to back that effort. 

On Wednesday, Microsoft forecast slower growth in its critical Azure cloud business as the company struggles to get data centers up and running fast enough to meet demand. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Iran launched numerous social media operations to destabilise Israel, Microsoft said in a report.
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Israel has become the top target of Iranian cyber attacks since the start of the Gaza war last year, while Tehran had focused primarily on the United States before the conflict, Microsoft said on Tuesday.

“Following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, Iran surged its cyber, influence, and cyber-enabled influence operations against Israel,” Microsoft said in an annual report.

“From October 7, 2023 to July 2024, nearly half of the Iranian operations Microsoft observed targeted Israeli companies,” said the Microsoft Digital Defence Report.

From July to October 2023, only 10% of Iranian cyber attacks targeted Israel, while 35% aimed at American entities and 20% at the United Arab Emirates, according to the U.S. software giant.

Since the war started, Iran has launched numerous social media operations with the aim of destabilising Israel.

‘Influence operations’

“Within two days of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Iran stood up several new influence operations,” Microsoft said.

An account called “Tears of War” impersonated Israeli activists critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of a crisis over scores of hostages taken by Hamas, according to the report.

An account called “KarMa”, created by an Iranian intelligence unit, claimed to represent Israelis calling for Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation.

Iran also began impersonating partners after the war started, Microsoft said.

Iranian services created a Telegram account using the logo of the military wing of Hamas to spread false messages about the hostages in Gaza and threaten Israelis, Microsoft said. It was not clear if Iran acted with Hamas’s consent, it added.

“Iranian groups also expanded their cyber-enabled influence operations beyond Israel, with a focus on undermining international political, military, and economic support for Israel’s military operations,” the report said.

The Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to a tally of official Israeli figures, including hostages killed in captivity.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed 42,289 people, the majority civilians, according to the Health Mministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Washington:

A false claim circulating on social media that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed after an alleged hit-and-run in San Francisco in 2011 is the work of a covert Russian disinformation operation, according to new research by Microsoft.

Researchers found that the operation created a video, paid an actor to appear as the alleged victim, and spread the claim through a fake website for a non-existent San Francisco news outlet named “KBSF-TV”. The Russian group responsible, which Microsoft dubs Storm-1516, is described as a Kremlin-aligned troll farm.

The discovery is a sign of Russia ramping up its foreign influence efforts ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election, Microsoft said.

A spokesperson for the Russian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

“Russian influence operations initially struggled to pivot operations aimed at the Democratic campaign following President Biden’s departure from the U.S. 2024 presidential race,” a blog published on Tuesday by Microsoft said.

“In late August, however, elements of prolific Russian actor Storm-1516 began producing content implicating Vice President Harris and Governor Walz in outlandish fake conspiracy theories,” Microsoft said, referring to Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz.

Storm-1516 is known for producing misleading videos featuring on-screen or voice actors who impersonate whistleblowers or journalists that share false, scandalous information, experts say.

A website for KBSF-TV was created shortly before publishing its first related article about the alleged driving incident, according to online registration records. The claim was circulated on social media platforms, including X.com, using the hashtag #HitAndRunKamala.

The video was also shared on Sept. 3 on X.com by Aussie Cossack, who describes himself as a “Registered foreign agent for Sputnik News,” with the message “make this go viral MAGA folks.” In total, it is estimated the video has been viewed more than 2.7 million times.

“Many entities within the pro-Russian ecosystem advanced the video and its claims,” said Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. “Storm-1516 relies on some of these personalities, such as Aussie Cossack, to drive amplification of its videos.”

Cossack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this month the U.S. Justice Department filed money-laundering charges against two employees of Russian state media network RT for what officials said was a scheme to hire an American company to produce online content to influence the election.

U.S. officials say Russia’s goal is to exacerbate U.S. political divisions and weaken public support for American military aid to Ukraine. Harris says if elected she will continue supporting Ukraine in its defence against Russia’s invasion.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Nvidia Corp., the world’s biggest chipmaker, has discussed joining a funding round for OpenAI that would value the artificial intelligence startup at more than $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also have been in talks about participating in the financing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The round would be led by Thrive Capital, which is investing about $1 billion, Bloomberg reported earlier this week. Nvidia has discussed investing about $100 million, two of the people said.

If the discussions move forward, it would mean the three most valuable tech companies are all backing OpenAI, maker of the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft was already OpenAI’s biggest funder, having invested roughly $13 billion.

Representatives for Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Thrive all declined to comment.

Big Tech’s influence over artificial intelligence has been drawing mounting scrutiny, with regulators in both the EU and US expressing concerns about Nvidia’s dominance in AI chips and Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI. Microsoft has tightly integrated OpenAI’s services into its Windows and Copilot AI platforms – a bet that the capabilities will help drive growth.

Apple has existing ties with OpenAI as well. The iPhone maker is adding ChatGPT to its new suite of AI features, called Apple Intelligence. The company also was slated to take a board observer seat at OpenAI – alongside Microsoft – but those plans were dropped in July.

Nvidia, meanwhile, supplies the critical infrastructure needed to develop and run AI tools like ChatGPT. It’s the biggest maker of so-called AI accelerators, sales of which have soared over the past two years.

In Nvidia’s latest quarterly report, released on Wednesday, revenue more than doubled to $30 billion. It predicted even bigger sales in the current quarter, topping the average analysts estimates, though investors have grown so accustomed to blowout results that the shares still declined.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told employees in a memo Wednesday that the company was seeking fresh capital, without giving details, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has been in discussions to raise funding at a valuation at or above $100 billion since at least December, Bloomberg has reported.

The financing would bolster one of the world’s most valuable venture-backed startups. The runaway success of ChatGPT also has kicked off an arms race among tech companies, which are integrating AI technology across their products and funding other promising startups.

In her memo to employees, Friar said that OpenAI would use the financing to acquire more computing power and fund other operating expenses, the people said.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the discussions with Apple.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI, the startup behind the popular ChatGPT, is reportedly in discussions to raise billions of dollars in a new funding round that could see it valued at above $100 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The funding round is expected to be led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, which is poised to invest approximately $1 billion, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tech giant and OpenAI backer Microsoft is also expected to put in money, it added.

OpenAI, Microsoft and Thrive Capital did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate human-like responses based on user prompts, has driven AI’s popularity and fueled a meteoric rise in the valuation of the San Francisco-based firm.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Less than two weeks after global outage, dubbed as “blue screen of death”, Microsoft suffered another similar incident, which the company said was triggered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattack. According to Forbes, the latest attack was reported by several users on Tuesday in which users complained of not being able to access several Microsoft services, such as Office, Outlook and Azure. The incident lasted nearly 10 hours. Companies affected by the new outage include UK bank NatWest, as per the BBC.

Other impacted services included Azure App Services, Application Insights, Azure IoT Central, Azure Log Search Alerts, Azure Policy, as well as the Azure portal itself and “a subset of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview services”.

The tech giant said it was a DDoS attack that floods a service with traffic in order to bring them to a standstill.

Firms usually put protection in place for DDoS attacks, but an error in the implementation of defences “amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it”, said Microsoft.

This is the second major attack in nearly as many weeks. A Microsoft error had crippled Windows computers worldwide on July 19. It was later revealed that an update to the anti-virus program ‘Falcon Sensor’ by CrowdStrike caused the massive outage.

From airlines to news channels, the glitch led to the crashing of IT systems, disrupting the daily proceedings.

CrowdStrike’s products are predominantly used by major organisations needing robust cyber attack protection, which is why the attack caused a global outage.

Reacting to the glitch, Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz said it was not a security incident or cyberattack. The company identified the issue, isolated it and deployed a fix.

Microsoft and Indian startup FluxGen have come up with a software solution to reduce water usage and detect leaks and wastage as several regions in India grapple with their worst water crises in recorded history.

In their pilot projects, the technology companies have started working at two hospitals in Bengaluru and have reduced water usage by 50% in both, said an official from FluxGen. 

He said the project was started at St Martha’s Hospital and another multi-speciality hospital in Whitefield in Bengaluru, a city whose water crisis made national headlines and also became a political issue in the general elections.

A FluxGen spokesperson said the project can be scaled nationally to solve India’s water issues. The two companies, he said, will deploy their advanced sensor fusion, artificial intelligence and internet of things (IoT) technologies to identify and mitigate leaks, wastage, and excessive use of water.

By 2030, India’s water demand is projected to be double the available supply, potentially impacting millions of people. The technology is expected to reduce water usage and make a difference in conservation.

FluxGen CEO Ganesh Shankar said the deployment of their solutions will cut down water consumption by 50% in hospitals and industrial units. 

Representational image of the Indian flag
| Photo Credit: AP

The first major multi-stakeholder coalition in India focused on the responsible development and deployment of AI technology, the Coalition for Responsible Evolution of AI (CoRE-AI), was created this week, bringing together over 30 key stakeholders in the tech space with a focus on fostering innovation among Indian AI startups and ensuring industry, academia and startup’s approach to regulating AI are heard by the government.

The coalition is housed within The Dialogue tech think tank based in New Delhi and brings together key stakeholders in the AI space from Big Tech players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to IT giants like Infosys and highly regarded academic institutions like Ashoka University and IIM Bangalore as well as a number of leading AI startups like BharatGPT-creator CoRover.ai and AI music startup Beatoven.ai.

The coalition primarily aims to create public trust in AI through voluntary industry guidelines and standards for the technology, robust AI regulatory frameworks, public-private partnerships, addressing bias and fairness in AI algorithms, transparency in AI operations and upholding user privacy and data protection.

“Government welcomes support, and interventions from a wide range of players who can bring the relevant information to the table on this aspect,” said Mr. S. Krishnan, Secretary, of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

“And taking in all of these inputs, undoubtedly a robust framework will emerge where India will also be able to not just use AI for the benefit of its own people, but play a leadership role globally. I’m confident the CoRE-AI forum will contribute to this larger national goal,” Mr. Krishnan said in a video statement.

With a vision of making AI in India and making AI work for India, the central government’s Cabinet approved the IndiaAI mission in March with a budget outlay of ₹10,372 crore.

The CoRE AI coalition said in an interview and statement to The Hindu that it will focus on exploring a “principles-based approach” utilising risk assessments to provide flexibility in addressing AI’s diverse challenges and will develop guidelines and contribute to a “robust governance framework,” in order to help create a trustworthy and innovative AI ecosystem in India.

“The Coalition will differentiate between regulating AI and regulating responsible AI practices, aiming to establish overarching principles for ethical AI development and deployment. This nuance will be essential as it shifts the focus from merely imposing restrictions on AI technologies to fostering an environment where ethical considerations, fairness, and transparency are integral to AI development and deployment,” CoRE AI told The Hindu.

Furthermore, the coalition said it will focus on understanding the impact of market forces on AI adoption and help provide clear direction when it comes to demand and governance frameworks “to boost confidence and innovation among startups,” a key focus of the entity.

“For AI to be responsibly built for the maximum collective good, there has to be explicit collaboration between start-ups, capital, policy-makers, big tech, academia and, yes, users. Only with frequent conversations and combined actions can we ensure that we are innovating at the scale and transparency that AI requires.” said Suparna Singh the CEO and Co-Founder of startup Frammer AI and the former President and CEO of NDTV. Singh is a Member of the Executive Committee of CoRE-AI.

CoRE-AI’s four key Working Groups which will work to execute the coalition’s responsible AI agenda are: Human-centred AI, ensuring that AI development prioritises human rights and societal values; AI and Innovation, focusing on fostering and showcasing AI innovation within India; AI Governance, developing frameworks and guidelines for the ethical and responsible governance of AI; DPI and AI, exploring AI in government welfare delivery and digital inclusion as well as public-private partnerships in DPI.

Late last year IBM and Meta, along with several prominent universities like IIT Bombay, and a group of tech startups and foundations, formed a global “AI Alliance,” which provides another pathway to responsible AI and potential competition for CoRE AI. The primary objective of the AI Alliance is to challenge the dominance of established players such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon in the field of AI, and prompt open innovation in AI.

Another new organisation involved in the space of of AI governance in India is the Artificial Intelligence Knowledge Consortium (AIKC) which was launched in March of this year by 12 research institutions and think tanks which joined forces to establish the consortium dedicated to championing a multi-stakeholder approach to AI governance.

Imagine a scene from Neuromancer: hackers breaking in, causing chaos with every keystroke. Now, flash back to this Friday. That sci-fi scenario? It’s suddenly not so fictional. A botched software update has just thrown real life into disarray. Planes grounded, emergency lines jammed, and check-in counters swamped with long, snaking lines of frustrated travellers.

The Microsoft outage has disrupted India’s aviation sector. As major airlines like Vistara, IndiGo, SpiceJet, and Akasa Air scramble with systems down, passengers face the brunt-endless lines, delayed flights, and a ticking clock. Even as airports like Delhi and Bengaluru report disruptions in up to 90% of flights, the response has been reactive, not proactive.

Also Read | The ‘Fake’ CrowdStrike Worker Who Crippled Windows Users Worldwide

This isn’t a plot twist from Mr. Robot, where vigilantes manipulate the digital world for justice or chaos. This is our reality-the infrastructure teetering on the edge because of a glitch. As we stand in overcrowded terminals or seek urgent help to no avail, the dystopian futures of cyberpunk are already knocking on our door.

Who Pays When Software Fails Us?

Think about the price tag of such an outage. Airlines cancel thousands of flights, hospitals delay life-saving procedures, and emergency responders hit a wall. The immediate cost is staggering, sure. But what about the long game? Lost trust, furious customers, and shaken investor confidence can balloon these costs to even more astronomical levels. How many millions – or billions – are we talking about here?

Why aren’t Microsoft or CrowdStrike held to the same stringent standards as those in more traditional sectors? A single faulty brake pad can trigger nationwide recalls in the automotive world. So why does the tech industry get a free pass when their mistakes can shut down our hospitals, ground our planes, and leave us stranded at check-in counters? It’s ridiculous.

Also Read | Airports Clearing Backlog After Global IT Chaos, Centre Shares An Update

When the digital infrastructure crumbles, the fallout is accepted as part of the modern condition. And where’s the backup plan? Our entire digital life hangs by the thread of a few lines of code with no strong fail-safe in sight. Why isn’t there a robust Plan B when Plan A fails so spectacularly? Shouldn’t there be mandatory, iron-clad redundancies for technologies that our lives depend on?

Another tech glitch, and who’s caught in the crossfire? The users, because we’re over-reliant on platforms like Microsoft. They blame CrowdStrike, but that’s not the point. Apple and Linux users dodged the bullet-why aren’t we spreading our risks? It’s high time we break up with single-system dependency.

We need more than apologies when tech systems fail disastrously. It’s time for stringent regulations to hold tech giants like Microsoft and their partners accountable, just as any other sector crucial to public safety and welfare would be.

Our reliance on these platforms is too critical to allow the ‘single-system dependency’ to continue unchecked. Let’s push for diversity in our tech solutions to safeguard our digital – and physical – lives. 

(Pankaj Mishra has been a journalist for over two decades and is the co-founder of FactorDaily.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity company behind a massive global IT outage, is a leader in its sector, known for building software defenses for the cloud computing age and exposing Russian and North Korean threats.

Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston.

Both Kurtz and Alperovitch had extensive backgrounds in cybersecurity, working at companies like McAfee.

Two years after its founding, CrowdStrike launched its signature product, the Falcon platform.

– Top player –

Crucially, the company embraced a “cloud-first” model to reduce big computing needs on customers and provide more effective protection.

Rather than just focusing on malware and antivirus products, the founders wanted to shift attention to identifying and stopping the attackers themselves and their techniques.

“CrowdStrike is one of the best known cybersecurity companies around,” said Michael Daniel, who worked as the White House cybersecurity coordinator during Barack Obama’s administration.

“It provides typically what we think of as sort of endpoint protection, meaning that it’s actually got software running on a server, or on a particular device, like a laptop or a desktop and it’s scanning for potential malware connections to bad domain names,” he said.

“It’s looking for behavior that might be unusual, that sort of thing,” said Daniel who now runs the Cyber Threat Alliance.

The company’s share price was down by about 9 percent in morning trading on Wall Street.

CrowdStrike became a publicly traded company in 2019 and the company’s total revenue in the last quarter was $921 million with projections of brining in about $4 billion in the current fiscal year.

The company’s main competitor is Palo Alto Networks as well as SentinelOne, which are standalone cybersecurity firms.

Cloud computing giants Microsoft, Amazon and Google also provide their own cybersecurity software and are rivals.

– North Korea hack –

But CrowdStrike is also a cyber intelligence company and made headlines when it was involved in investigating several high-profile cyberattacks.

Most famously, in 2014, CrowdStrike discovered evidence linking North Korean actors to the hack of servers at Sony Pictures.

The hackers stole large amounts of data and threatened terrorist acts against movie theaters to prevent the release of “The Interview,” a comedy about North Korea’s leader.

The studio initially canceled the movie’s theatrical release, but reversed its decision after criticism.

Sony estimated the direct costs of the hack to be around $35 million for investigating and remediating the breach.

CrowdStrike also helped investigate the 2015-2016 cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the United States and their connection to Russian intelligence services.

In December 2016, CrowdStrike released a report stating that a Russian government-affiliated group called Fancy Bear had hacked a Ukrainian artillery app, potentially causing significant losses to Ukrainian artillery units.

However, this assessment was later disputed by some organizations and CrowdStrike rolled back some of the claims.

– Criticism of Microsoft –

In recent months, CrowdStike has criticized Microsoft for its lapses on cyber security as the Windows maker admitted to vulnerabilities and hackings by outside actors.

Among other criticisms, CrowdStrike slammed Microsoft for still doing business in China.

“You’re telling the public they can’t use Huawei, and they can’t let kids watch dance videos on TikTok because China is going to collect intelligence,” Shawn Henry, chief security officer at CrowdStrike said last year.

“Yet the most ubiquitous software, which is used throughout the government and throughout every single corporation in this country and around the world, has engineers in China working on their software,” Henry told Forbes.

 

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)