Microsoft is working to resolve an ongoing Exchange Online outage that is delaying email sent to and received from external domains.

The company first acknowledged this incident (tracked under EX1467029) at 02:19 AM EDT, when it began investigating reports of intermittent “Server busy” errors.

“This issue impacts users who may be attempting to send and receive email messages from external domains in Exchange Online. Users may experience intermittent ‘Server busy’ errors, affecting multiple mailboxes,” Microsoft said in a service alert seen by BleepingComputer.

“Depending on the client, the service should attempt to periodically retry sending the email previously impacted by the issue. If the initial sender received an NDR after 24-72 hours (different clients or email providers can vary), they will need to send a new email.”

Microsoft says these ongoing email issues may be aggravated by anti-spam protections, which further delay affected accounts.

The company did not provide a timeline for full remediation, saying it’s still investigating the issue to understand the root cause and will provide further details later today.

“Our initial investigation has identified instances where anti-spam protections may be contributing to impact for a subset of users,” the company added. “We are continuing to analyse the behaviour and review service telemetry to better understand the underlying cause and determine the most effective mitigation path.”

While Microsoft has yet to disclose which regions are impacted by this ongoing outage or how many users are affected, it has flagged it as an incident, which usually involves noticeable user impact.

In April, Microsoft also resolved an Exchange Online outage that prevented users from accessing mailboxes and calendars via Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync, and other Exchange Online connection protocols. and Exchange Online mailbox access issues that intermittently affected Outlook mobile and macOS users for weeks.

More recently, in June, it addressed a similar service issue affecting the mail flow for customers in North America, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Europe.

Earlier this week, on Thursday, it also mitigated a massive outage that caused authentication issues, connection problems, service delays and failures, and other issues for Microsoft 365 customers.

Update September 04, 10:26 EDT: Microsoft says that the EX1467029 issue has been resolved for new emails.

“Telemetry shows that the service is performing as expected for new emails and this is in line with organizations confirming that the issue no longer occurring,” Microsoft said. “We’re monitoring email queues and performing final validations to confirm the issue is fully resolved.”

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

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“Broadcom has burned all the bridges. While it may be easier to migrate to whatever this new [vSphere] Standard release is from vSphere 8, they have already shown both customers and [channel] partners they can’t be trusted,” he told Ars Technica.

You can find similar sentiments about trust in online discussions about VMware’s announcement.

“Too little, too late. We’ve moved on,” a Reddit user named bakonpie wrote about the upcoming update.

Broadcom’s stated interest in smaller sales comes as VMware rivals are openly vying for disgruntled VMware users, especially those that are SMBs.

“An updated vSphere Standard signals Broadcom heard the market, but three years of neglect, quote refusals, and VCF-only sales tactics have already pushed many SMBs toward Nutanix, Proxmox, and [Microsoft] Hyper-V,” Sumit Bhatia, co-author of the book Navigating VMware Turmoil in the Broadcom Era, told Ars. “Trust, not features, is the real deficit. Broadcom must prove sustained commitment—stable pricing, reliable renewals, and real investment—before SMBs treat vSphere Standard as safe again.”

A vSphere Standard update would need “predictable, published pricing with no surprise renewal spikes; a genuine capped-term or perpetual-style license option; core features, like [vSphere] vMotion, [vSphere High Availability], and backup integration without upsell gates; simplified per-socket licensing instead of per-core minimums built for hyperscale environments,” Bhatia said.

“VMware’s biggest challenge is convincing a burned market that Broadcom won’t repeat the bait-and-switch once switching costs make customers captive again,” he added

It’s unclear how important SMBs truly are to Broadcom’s overall goals. The conglomerate’s software business has thrived since its VMware takeover and made $8.75 billion in revenue (a 29 percent year-over-year increase) in fiscal Q3 2026.

Still, if Broadcom puts an effort into making vSphere Standard more appealing and, critically, accessible again, it could make some SMBs more comfortable sticking with VMware instead of spending time and money determining how to properly migrate.

Brisbane step up their bid to win a third flag in a row as they face Sydney in an enticing AFL 2026 Qualifying Final at the SCG. The Lions will be looking to prey on a Swans team missing several players as they hunt a place in the preliminary finals.

The reigning champions know exactly what it takes to reach and indeed win an AFL Grand Final, doing so in each of the past two years — including beating Sydney in the 2024 showpiece at the MCG. Brisbane look menacing again this time around, winning 10 of their last 11 matches by an average of 48 points to finish third in the ladder.

When the Fenix 8 finally dropped in 2024, it quickly earned a reputation as the best Garmin GPS watch money can buy, even if that meant parting with a lot of money. I gave it a thorough test on the 11-day trek to Everest Base Camp, and with Garmin’s full suite of training features, a bright AMOLED display, microphone and speaker, plus an LED torch, there was no doubt that it was a big step up from the hugely popular Fenix 7.

Last year, Garmin followed the Garmin Fenix 8 up with the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro, which took the winning formula and added built-in LTE cellular and inReach satellite connectivity for phone-free messaging and SOS alerts. I tested it at the Love Trails running festival this summer, and genuinely started to doubt the rumours that a Fenix 9 could really be imminent. What more could there possibly be to add?

science

Eight year after launch, Mercury probe and its Mercury Transfer Module consciously uncouple as orbit approaches

After nearly eight years, ESA and JAXA’s BepiColombo spacecraft is finally nearing Mercury, as engineers begin the arrival sequence by jettisoning the power module that got it this far. 

The spacecraft stack separated from the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM) on September 3 at around 1400 CEST. After a tense few minutes, controllers confirmed that a preliminary Doppler signal had been detected, indicating that the MTM had separated successfully; by 1552 CEST, it was confirmed that signals had been picked up, indicating that all had gone to plan. The solar panels of the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) were charging the spacecraft’s batteries.

The next stage involves dropping into orbit around Mercury on November 21. Then the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) – aka Mio – will be released between December 9 and 10, and a week later MPO will start moving to its final orbit over 480 x 1500 km, with science commencing in April 2027.

The arrival is a year later than planned. BepiColombo was supposed to have been orbiting Mercury in December 2025, but problems with the spacecraft’s Solar Electric Power (SEP) system meant the trajectory had to be rethought, which extended the spacecraft’s cruise.

BepiColombo is no stranger to Mercury and has performed six flybys of the planet since 2021. It has also conducted flybys of Venus and Earth following its 2018 launch.

The spacecraft is an impressive example of international cooperation. The MPO and MTM are ESA contributions, while the MMO comes from JAXA. ESA also provided the sunshield to protect the MMO during transit. This sunshield will be ejected after the MMO is released.

The MPO is the big brother of the BepiColombo partnership, with a main body measuring 2.4 x 2.2 x 1.7 m and a mass of 1,230 kg (including an 85 kg science payload). JAXA’s MMO is 1.8 m in diameter and 1.1 m high, and weighs 255 kg (45 kg of which is the science payload). While MPO is 3-axis stabilized and nadir-pointing, MMO will be spin-stabilized at 15 rpm, with its spin axis 90 degrees to the Sun.

The goal of the mission is a study of Mercury, “from the structure and dynamics of its magnetosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, to the properties of its large iron core and the origin of its magnetic field.”

The initial mission at Mercury is planned for one Earth year (approximately four Mercury years), although it could be extended by another Earth year. ®

An anonymous security researcher who uses the “Nightmare Eclipse” handle released a CrowdStrike Falcon zero-day exploit named “FalconFlank” that lets attackers escalate privileges on up-to-date Windows systems.

Nightmare Eclipse says the new vulnerability (which has yet to be assigned a CVE ID) affects devices running the latest versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server, as well as CrowdStrike’s endpoint security platform.

Successful exploitation allows attackers to spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges by abusing CrowdStrike Falcon’s Office malicious macros remediation feature.

“FalconFlank is a 0day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in Crowdstrike Falcon Sensor, obviously by the time I drop this Crowdstrike would already have detections for it so if you want to test you either have to add it to the exclusions or obfuscate the PoC and change the dll load technique,” Nightmare Eclipse said. “As of now it works in a fully updated windows 11 25H2 / Windows Server 2025 with Crowdstrike Falcon.”

When BleepingComputer asked for more details about this vulnerability, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said the company is investigating the researcher’s claims and advised customers to disable the Microsoft Office Windows policy setting that toggles the security software’s File Suspicious Macro Removal feature.

“We are actively investigating these claims and advise customers to disable the Microsoft Office File Suspicious Macro Removal Windows policy setting,” the spokesperson told BleepingComputer. “Customers remain protected through the Cloud Anti-malware for Microsoft Office Files settings. We refer customers to the FalconFlank Tech Alert in the CrowdStrike support portal.”

Although the company also shared this link to the tech alert regarding the FalconFlank zero-day exploit, the advisory is not public, and customers can access it only if they have an account on CrowdStrike’s support portal.

CrowdStrike has yet to reply to a second email asking for a copy of the FalconFlank tech alert and whether a CVE ID has been assigned to the FalconFlank flaw.

Kaspersky, Avast, Nvidia, and Microsoft zero-days

This week, Nightmare Eclipse has also released privilege escalation zero-day exploits for Kaspersky Antivirus for Endpoint (named HardBreacher) and GenDigital Avast Antivirus (PrettyPrague), as well as a denial-of-service zero-day for Nvidia (named GreenSection) that will crash the system.

Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont confirmed on Thursday that the privilege escalation exploits released by Nightmare Eclipse this week are real and work.

Nightmare Eclipse has also disclosed multiple zero-day exploits targeting multiple Microsoft products since April, including Microsoft Defender, BitLocker, and various other Windows components.

These Microsoft zero-days are known as LegacyHive, RoguePlanet, BlueHammer, RedSun, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, MiniPlasma, and UnDefend. While the LegacyHive, RoguePlanet, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma flaws have since been fixed, the other security flaws remain zero-days and are still awaiting an official patch.

After Nightmare Eclipse disclosed the first zero-days, Microsoft responded with warnings of legal action against people engaging in “malicious activity causing real harm to our customers,” prompting many to believe that the company was directly threatening the security researcher.

Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.

The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.

Get the report

from the ready-fire-aim dept

I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don’t think any of this was some attempt to Streisand what is perhaps already the most anticipated game of all time into wider news coverage, and that is backed up by the DMCA blitz Take-Two has gone on to try to bury all of these leaks.

Those attempts shouldn’t surprise anyone, honestly. Take-Two and Rockstar have historically abused copyright law to try to bury all kinds of content it doesn’t like, whether it’s been game leaks in the past, or cheats for its games, or mods it doesn’t like.

But it sure would be nice if the partners Take-Two has doing the abusing of the law could bother to be somewhat accurate and not ensnare a gaming journalist for the crime of posting publicly available court documents.

On August 26, Stephen Totilo — the longtime Kotaku editor-in-chief who now runs the Game File newsletter — was locked out of his X account over a DMCA notice filed on Take-Two’s behalf. Totilo’s offense, by his own account, was an August 21 post reporting that judges in New York had cleared Take-Two to subpoena Microsoft and Discord in the leak hunt.

Attached were three screenshots: the two court orders, and a tweet from Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet pledging Microsoft is “working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games.” No leaked footage. No gameplay. The orders are public records that never once use the words Grand Theft Auto.

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After Totilo complained both to ExTwitter and on ExTwitter, his account and the original tweet were restored and the DMCA claim had been rescinded. There is no indication that Take-Two or the vendor it was using to police the internet for these leaks have said anything publicly or privately to Totilo. They just nuked his account over a bullshit claim that ten seconds of review would indicate contained no infringing material, then restored it when the mistake was called out, and now are trying to Homer Simpson back into the bushes as though nothing happened.

But what makes this all the more frustrating is that the DMCA notice doesn’t make a copyright claim. It appears to make a trademark claim, instead.

It asserts Take-Two’s international figurative trademark on Grand Theft Auto — a trademark on the logo — and argues there is a likelihood of confusion, the legal test for whether the public might mistake someone else’s goods for the brand’s.

In plain English: a copyright takedown form was used to make a logo complaint, against images that contain neither the logo nor a single frame of the game.

The notice describes the reported content — federal court orders included — as “video/audiovisual recording,” and certifies all of it as accurate under penalty of perjury, the line that makes knowingly lying on the form a federal offense.

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Everyone in this portion of the story, save Totilo, sucks at their jobs. Take-Two has clearly partnered with a company, Ebrand, that is not up to the task of properly policing IP on the internet. Ebrand messed this up badly, asserting a trademark claim via a copyright mechanism. ExTwitter, for its part, apparently demonstrated just how little review is done on this sort of thing, having taken down the tweet and suspending a journalist’s account over this absolute mess of a DMCA claim. It’s a full cornucopia of stupid on display for the world to see.

And this isn’t a one-off. Gamestop was also ensnared in Take-Two’s DMCA blitz. Its crime appears to be sharing a promotional screenshot for GTA6 that Rockstar specifically made available for use publicly.

Its August 20 post promoting a story on the billions in market value Take-Two shed as the leaks spread got struck, and the image X wiped was Rockstar’s own official GTA 6 screenshot, straight from the press gallery on Rockstar’s site.

That exact shot has run on dozens of outlets since May 2025, IGN and Mashable included. Take-Two’s vendor filed federal paperwork against a promotional asset Rockstar distributes so that outlets will use it.

There is simply no point to the DMCA’s “under penalty of perjury” language if it can’t be employed in a situation like this. At the very, very best, Ebrand and Take-Two are guilty of unbelievable negligence in issuing these DMCA takedowns and copyright strikes. When we’re talking about even temporary takedowns of the work of journalists, the First Amendment implications become obvious.

To allow these companies to simply slink away without penalty is why this sort of thing keeps happening. If there are no consequences to a carpet-bomb approach to copyright (trademark?) takedowns, then they will, and do, continue.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca, grand theft auto 6, journalism, leaks, stephen totilo, trademark, video games

Companies: ebrand, gamestop, take two, x

On-PREM

AI workstation promises to put up to 576 GB of HBM3e and 16 TB/s of memory bandwidth on your desk

Machine learning researchers have a new and expensive option for doing local AI. AMD just raided its spare parts bin and cobbled together a DGX Station rival boasting up to 576 GB of HBM3e memory that it’s calling the Threadripper Halo.

Announced at IFA 2026, the system, which is set to launch next year, marks the first time that AMD’s Instinct accelerators have been offered in a workstation form factor.

But much like the AI Halo we reviewed earlier this year, the Threadripper Halo isn’t packing anything we haven’t seen before. The liquid-cooled system is powered by a 96-core Threadripper PRO 9995WX, which you may recall made its debut in 2025. The CPU is backed by up to 2 TB of DDR5 memory and up to 2.6 TB of combined system memory.

As you probably already guessed, AMD is positioning the box as a local AI workstation for researchers. From what we gather, the system can be had with up to four of the company’s PCIe-based Instinct GPUs — though the systems displayed at IFA only showed two installed.

Launched back in May, the MI350P is essentially half of an MI350X that’s been crammed into a PCIe form factor. Each accelerator packs 144 GB of speedy HBM3e good for 4 TB/s of memory bandwidth, and up to 4.6 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute. But we’ll note that it’s in its 600 W configuration. When deployed in the Threadripper Halo, we expect AMD will be running the cards in the more sedate 450 W config.

Combined, the Threadripper Halo promises up to 576 GB of HBM3e and 16 TB/s of memory bandwidth, enabling the system to run models exceeding a trillion parameters in size (at four-bit precision) entirely in GPU memory. By offloading some of the model to system memory, the system should be able to run the largest open weights models, like Moonshot.AI’s 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3.

The ability to run large frontier-class models on your desk won’t come cheap and may not be available in every market, at least not without an electrical service upgrade. AMD hasn’t shared pricing, but as configured, we expect it to sell for somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000.

A quad MI350P system is going to push the limits of a standard North American power outlet unless AMD either underclocks the cards from 600 W to 300 W or it mandates a 20 amp circuit. This might explain why the system AMD showed off at IFA only had two. 

At this price and power level, the system is well positioned to compete with Nvidia’s own high-end AI workstation, the DGX Station. Announced at GTC in 2025, the DGX Station features a 252 GB B300 GPU and a 72-core Grace CPU along with 496 GB of LPDDR5x memory, and it retails for around $100,000 if you can find one in stock.

The House of Zen boasts that the system offers up to 3.4x the total system memory and more than twice the memory bandwidth of the DGX Station, which should give an edge in LLM inference, assuming tensor parallel operations don’t bottleneck on the CPU’s PCIe bus.

AMD says the Threadripper Halo will be available starting next year. ®

Art TVs have spent years asking buyers to accept a peculiar bargain: your television can look like framed artwork when nobody is watching it, provided you are willing to surrender some picture quality when everyone sits down for movie night.

Skyworth thinks that compromise has gone on long enough.

The new Skyworth C2 Canvas Art TV, making its official debut at CEDIA Expo 2026, takes several of the display technologies introduced with the company’s much more expensive CE1 Canvas Elite and brings them to 55, 65 and 75-inch screen sizes.

The headline upgrade is QD Mini LED backlighting with more than 400 full-array local dimming zones, combined with 1,000 nits of claimed peak brightness, a 144Hz refresh rate and Skyworth’s OmniView Matte Screen. HDR support includes both Dolby Vision and HDR10+. That makes the C2 considerably more interesting than another television wearing a decorative wooden frame.

Related: Best TVs Of 2026: Editors’ Choice Podcast

This Is a Huge Upgrade Over the Skyworth C1

The difference between the existing C1 Canvas Art TV and the new C2 is substantial.

Skyworth’s current C1 uses a conventional LED backlight, operates at 60Hz and is rated at just 300 nits of brightness. It already offers a matte anti-glare screen, flush mounting, Art Mode and an included wood grain frame, but its specifications clearly place aesthetics ahead of serious HDR performance. 

The C2 changes that equation with 1,000 nits, 144Hz and full-array local dimming with more than 400 zones. In other words, this is not Skyworth changing the frame, adding three new Van Goghs and calling it a product cycle.

The additional brightness should provide significantly more headroom for HDR content, while local dimming gives the television far greater control over dark and bright portions of an image than the C1’s conventional LED backlight can provide. How well those 400-plus zones actually control blooming and black levels will require testing, but the underlying hardware represents a major step forward.

The 144Hz refresh rate also makes the C2 considerably more appropriate for gaming and fast-moving content than its 60Hz predecessor, although Skyworth has not yet provided a complete C2 connectivity specification or confirmed its HDMI configuration in the announcement.

That omission is worth keeping in mind before anyone starts assigning HDMI 2.1 ports that Skyworth has not actually announced.

How Close Is It to the Canvas Elite CE1?

Skyworth introduced the CE1 Canvas Elite at CEDIA Expo 2025 in 86 and 100-inch sizes, and eCoustics subsequently named the 100-inch model our Best Art TV at CEDIA 2025.

The CE1 remains the superior display on paper. It uses QD Mini LED technology with more than 1,000 local dimming zones, reaches a claimed 2,000 nits, offers a 144Hz refresh rate and uses the same OmniView Matte Screen technology. The 86-inch model is currently listed at $3,999 and the 100-inch version at $5,999. 

The C2 therefore does not duplicate CE1 performance. It effectively moves some of the flagship’s display architecture further down the Canvas range, with roughly half the claimed peak brightness and substantially fewer dimming zones.

That is actually the more important story.

A 100-inch $5,999 lifestyle television is impressive, but it is not going into most living rooms. A 55, 65 or 75-inch version using full-array QD Mini LED technology has the potential to compete for considerably more wall space.

Pricing will determine whether that potential becomes reality.

Is the Skyworth C2 Really Unique?

Not entirely, and this is where the marketing department needs to put the champagne back in the refrigerator.

Mini LED is no longer exclusive to Skyworth among televisions designed to double as artwork. Samsung’s 2026 The Frame Pro uses its Neo QLED Mini LED platform and supports 144Hz operation, while TCL has also introduced QD Mini LED technology in its premium NXTVISION Art TV lineup. 

What makes the C2 Canvas Art TV noteworthy is the combination Skyworth is bringing into its standard Canvas range: full-array QD Mini LED backlighting, 400-plus local dimming zones, 1,000-nit claimed brightness, 144Hz operation, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and a matte display.

There is another important distinction. Skyworth supports Dolby Vision, which Samsung still does not offer on its televisions.

The company has also integrated a subwoofer and Dolby Atmos audio into the C2. Skyworth goes so far as to suggest an external soundbar is unnecessary. We will reserve judgment on that one until somebody actually listens to it; physics has not yet received notice that it has been cancelled. 

CEDIA Is Also Part of the Story

The C2 is not being positioned solely as another television destined for a pallet at Costco.

Skyworth says the new models will be distributed through its authorized custom integration dealer network, which helps explain the CEDIA Expo debut. The company supports integration with control platforms including Control4 and Crestron, while installers can order customizable frames through Skyworth’s partnership with Hydro Frames.

Standard frame finishes include black, silver, gold, white and walnut, with additional custom patterns and colors available. 

That flexibility matters in a category where the television is supposed to disappear into the room rather than announce that somebody bought another 75-inch black rectangle.

Skyworth Is Becoming Harder to Ignore

The C2 also arrives during a much more consequential year for Skyworth in North America.

Earlier in 2026, Panasonic announced a strategic partnership with Skyworth for its U.S. television business, with Skyworth USA assuming a major operational role covering sales, marketing and logistics while the relationship also leverages Skyworth’s manufacturing scale. That development followed Skyworth’s growing push into premium Art TVs and outdoor displays in the American market. 

That makes products like the C2 worth watching beyond their individual specifications. Skyworth is no longer merely another enormous Chinese television manufacturer trying to establish name recognition with American consumers. Its role in the North American television business is expanding rather quickly.

The Bottom Line

The Skyworth C2 Canvas Art TV looks like a far more consequential product than the C1 it follows.

Moving from a 300-nit, 60Hz conventional LED platform to 1,000 nits, 144Hz and more than 400 full-array local dimming zones changes the conversation from “television that looks attractive on the wall” to something that could potentially deliver credible home theater performance as well. It is not the first premium Art TV to embrace Mini LED, and Skyworth still needs to reveal important details including pricing, complete connectivity and final availability.

But if the C2 arrives at the right price, Samsung, Hisense and TCL will have another serious competitor hanging on the wall. And this one appears rather more interested in what happens after you stop looking at the Monet.

Price & Availability

The Skyworth USA website currently lists pricing at $1,399 to $2,499, but we haven’t received any information when it will become available yet.

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