Tech

Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools

Published

5 hours ago

6 February 2026

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.

While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.

Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.

“In the future, apps are going to consume services which require payments. Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s truly needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

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“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes that its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who has vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe-coding platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.

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The messy truth about TikTok’s Trump-aligned takeover

Published

4 minutes ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

It’s been just over a week since TikTok — in the United States — transferred into the hands of new owners. And it’s been a mess ever since.

At the government’s urging, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance sold the app to a mostly American group of investors, including the software business giant Oracle (founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison), MGX (an Abu Dhabi-based company also involved in Trump crypto ventures) and the private equity firm Silver Lake.

But since the new owners took control, the app has seen major outages and malfunctions, claims of censorship and uproar over its updated terms of service.

Today, Explained guest host Jonquilyn Hill sat down with David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge, to break down people’s concerns about TikTok’s new owners and what this may mean for people’s experiences on the social media app in the future. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

American TikTok has new owners now, and almost immediately after they took over, people started reporting issues with the app. I wanna start with the big one. People said that they were being censored. What’s going on there, and what are the complaints?

That is the big one. It’s also the most complicated one to sort through because fundamentally, it’s about feelings. So a thing to understand is that everybody has always believed they’re being censored on social media. Since time immemorial, this is the story of social media. What’s happening on TikTok is at this particular moment I believe less about censorship and more about normal internet problems.

There were a lot of people reporting that they would upload videos around what was happening in Minneapolis and those videos would get no views or those videos would actually not upload properly. There were people who were saying that if you DM’d the word “Epstein” to somebody else that that wouldn’t go through. All of this is more easily and just as successfully explained by normal corporate ineptitude.

TikTok’s new data center provider, Oracle, had a huge outage. What we think we know is that it was a big data center in Virginia that had what they called a weather-related issue. They’ve had big issues at the data center and that seems to be the actual culprit here.

There are lots of good reasons to be worried about censorship. There are lots of potential censorship problems coming to TikTok, but rationally speaking, the likelihood that this new group would have taken over TikTok and immediately smash a big red “censorship” button is pretty unlikely.

Is there a way for us to actually know? I mean, people are pretty skeptical of TikTok right now.

I think one useful analog here is when Elon Musk bought and took over Twitter. And when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he just said out loud all of the changes he was intending to make, right? And this was after years of conservatives, in particular, saying that they were being censored by Twitter’s existing leadership.

So, Elon Musk comes in and essentially says, I’m going to reverse that. And then does a bunch of very obvious things. So, I think there is a version of this that feels very obvious. It’s just that for right now, there are better, simpler sort of Occam’s Razor-y explanations for what’s going on.

What about the new terms of service that folks had to agree to?

This is a tricky one because one of the very funny things about terms of service on apps like these is that they’re always terrifying, and they’re often terrifying for totally non-terrifying reasons.

What happened in this case is there are some new things in the terms of service. The new TikTok US is going to collect more precise location data if you allow it. It also gives TikTok permission to collect a bunch of data around kind of nebulous AI things that make it clear they’re gonna do a lot of sort of gen AI stuff inside of TikTok, and that’s data they can collect.

But, actually, that has been in TikTok’s terms of service for some time. Still, I think it is reasonable to be alarmed that this data is going to be collected by a new group of people.

All of this is the business side; but will my experience on the app change now?

The one thing that actually no other platform has done a good job of replicating [is TikTok’s algorithm]. But now, one of the stipulations of this deal is that there has to be some meaningful separation of that algorithm from Chinese control. The new owners are going to “retrain, test, and update” the algorithm. That is a very vague phrase, but it means in some way the algorithm is going to change. But that we’re going to not see [how] for a while.

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Soviet secrets and Star Wars prototypes: Avalanche raises $29M for its desktop-sized power quest

Published

16 minutes ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Avalanche Energy employee prepares fusion plasma test on one of the company’s compact devices. (Avalanche Photo)

Seattle startup Avalanche Energy on Tuesday announced $29 million in funding to support its push toward fusion power and to help launch a commercial-scale testing facility for fusion technologies.

The private investment was led by RA Capital Management and brings the startup’s total funding to $105 million across investors and government grants.

The new capital is largely earmarked for FusionWERX, a test facility in Richland, Wash., that is a public-private partnership offering shared R&D resources to companies, government labs and universities to develop the sector’s supply chain and to produce radioactive materials. The site is expected to open next year and is supported by $10 million in matching funds provided by Washington state.

The recent investment will also help pay for equipment including superconducting magnets that will be needed for Avalanche’s next-generation compact fusion device.

The fusion sector has attracted massive investments in recent years as energy-hungry data centers expand nationally to meet burgeoning AI needs. Avalanche is targeting slightly different use cases, but still benefiting from the insatiable appetite for clean power.

The round included all of the startup’s existing backers: Congruent Ventures, Founders Fund, Lowercarbon Capital and Toyota Ventures. New investors 8090 Industries, Overlay Capital and others also joined.

An outlier in the fusion race

Avalanche Energy employee working on the plasma core of fusion machine. (Avalanche Photo)

Avalanche remains an outlier in the Pacific Northwest’s fusion ecosystem. While local rivals Helion Energy, Zap Energy and General Fusion are aiming for large devices to feed electrons to the electrical grid, Avalanche is going small.

The company has its sights on desktop-sized machines well-suited for space or defense applications — environments where portability and power density are more critical than sheer grid-scale output.

Avalanche founders Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan have likewise taken a less conventional path to founding the company, coming not from physics labs in academia but from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin where they worked on rocket propulsion.

Their iterative, builder-focused approach has led them to unlikely sources of inspiration — most recently, decades-old research from Russia’s Mirror fusion program that helped them reorient some misbehaving plasma.

“There’s a little bit of archeology going on, digging up old Soviet papers from the ’80s that are not necessarily well digitized,” said Langtry, the company’s CEO. But the overlooked discoveries by the Russians can be successfully applied to Avalanche’s fusion devices, he said. “We ended up borrowing some of their ideas.”

Progress in pursuit of fusion

Since launching in 2018, the team has grown to 50 employees and notched recent advances:

Taming plasma: Avalanche overcame two critical technical challenges around creating stable, clean plasma — which is a fourth state of matter in addition to solid, liquid and gas that’s key to generating fusion energy.
High-voltage stability: The team operated its fusion device at 300,000 volts, a new record for compact, magneto-electrostatic fusion technology.
The prototypes: The startup is currently working with two compact fusion prototypes: Jyn and the slightly larger Lando, named after Star Wars’ protagonists Jyn Erso and Lando Calrissian.

The team hopes its next fusion machine will hit the sought-after target of “Q greater than one” — which is when more energy is produced by the plasma than was put into it.

Though Avalanche is charting its own course, it’s part of a global race to harness the energy created when small atoms are forced to collide and fuse — mimicking the reactions that power the sun. Physicists have spent decades trying to develop commercially viable fusion. None so far have succeeded, but some companies claim they’re getting close.

“The time where you could kind of get by with paper designs and plans is sort of ending. It’s really all about who can build these machines in the next couple years and really demonstrate record-breaking plasmas and then commercialize that,” Langtry said, adding, “we’re going to be right there with them.”

Editor’s note: Story updated to correct a reference to the Soviet Mirror fusion program.

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Tech

Getting The VIC-20 To Speak Again

Published

30 minutes ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

The Commodore Amiga was famous for its characteristic Say voice, with its robotic enunciation being somewhat emblematic of the 16-bit era. The Commodore VIC-20 had no such capability out of the box, but [Mike] was able to get one talking with a little bit of work.

The project centers around the Adventureland cartridge, created by Scott Adams (but not the one you’re thinking of). It was a simple game that was able to deliver speech with the aid of the Votrax Type and Talk speech synthesizer box. Those aren’t exactly easy to come by, so [Mike] set about creating a modern equivalent. The concept was simple enough. An Arduino would be used to act as a go between the VIC-20’s slow serial port operating at 300 bps and the Speakjet and TTS256 chips which both preferred to talk at 9600 bps. The audio output of the Speakjet is then passed to an LM386 op-amp, set up as an amplifier to drive a small speaker. The lashed-together TTS system basically just reads out the text from the Adventureland game in an incredibly robotic voice. It’s relatively hard to understand and has poor cadence, but it does work – in much the same way as the original Type and Talk setup would have back in the day!

Text to speech tools have come a long way since the 1980s, particularly when it comes to sounding more natural. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

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Google Confirms AirDrop Sharing is Coming To Android Phones Beyond Pixels

Published

45 minutes ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Google’s Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series since its surprise launch last year, is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.

Eric Kay, Google’s Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company’s Taipei office, saying Google is “working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem” and that announcements are coming “very soon.” Nothing is the only OEM to have publicly confirmed it’s working on support, though Qualcomm has also hinted at enabling the feature on Snapdragon-powered phones.

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Simple Ways to Grow Your Business Using Social Media

Published

58 minutes ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Social media doesn’t grow businesses by magic. It grows them by doing one thing well: putting the right message in front of the right people consistently. Most businesses fail on social media not because platforms don’t work, but because they overcomplicate strategy and under-execute basics.

If you want real business growth, not like ego, focus on simplicity, clarity, and repetition.

Stop Trying to Be Everywhere

The fastest way to fail on social media is to try to dominate every platform at once, a mistake Ahmedabad call girls often note when discussing visibility. Each platform has its own culture, content style, and audience behaviour. Spreading thin leads to inconsistent posting and weak messaging.

Simple rule:

Pick one or two platforms where your customers already spend time.
Learn how those platforms reward content.
Go deep instead of wide.

Consistency on one platform beats a half-hearted presence on five.

Know Exactly Who You’re Talking To

Generic content attracts generic results.

If your posts feel like they’re for everyone, they’ll resonate with no one. Social media rewards specificity. Clear messaging signals relevance, and relevance drives engagement.

Define:

Who your ideal customer is
What problem they trying to solve
What outcome do they care about most

Every post should answer one question for your audience: Why should I care?

Businesses that only post promotions get ignored. Social media is not a billboard, it’s a conversation channel.

Effective content falls into three categories:

Educational (teaches something useful)
Relatable (reflects customer pain points)
Trust-building (shows credibility or process)

Promotional posts should be the minority. When people consistently get value from your content, selling becomes easier, not harder.

Keep Your Content Simple and Clear

A man wearing glasses intently looks at a smartphone, with an open laptop displaying a news article to his left. A lit candle holder glows softly in the background, creating a warm atmosphere. — Overproduced content often underperforms

Clear messages beat fancy graphics, something Mumbai call girls often emphasize in communication strategy. Short captions beat paragraphs. Direct hooks beat clever wordplay.

People scroll fast. If your message isn’t obvious in the first few seconds, it’s gone.

Good social media content:

Solves one problem per post
Uses plain language
Avoids jargon
Gets to the point quickly

Clarity is a competitive advantage.

Post Consistently, Not Constantly

Posting more doesn’t guarantee growth. Posting consistently does.

Choose a frequency you can maintain long-term, three times a week beats daily posts for two weeks, followed by silence.

Consistency builds:

Algorithm trust
Audience expectation
Brand familiarity

Growth compounds when people see you regularly, not randomly.

Engage Like a Human, Not a Brand

Social media is two-way. Posting without responding kills momentum.

Reply to comments. Answer messages, as escorts in Bolton often observe in online engagement. Engage with similar accounts. This signals authenticity and boosts reach.

Algorithms favour accounts that:

Start conversations
Respond quickly
Keep users interacting

Engagement isn’t a distraction, it’s distribution.

Use Analytics Without Obsessing

Data matters, but over-analysis slows action.

Track basics:

Reach
Engagement
Clicks or inquiries

Identify patterns, not perfection. Double down on what works, drop what doesn’t, and move on.

Social media success comes from iteration, not prediction.

Show Process, Not Just Results

People trust businesses that show how things work.

Behind-the-scenes content, workflows, client journeys, and lessons learned humanize your brand and build credibility.

You don’t need perfection. You need transparency.

Process content reduces skepticism and shortens buying decisions.

Testimonials, reviews, and case studies matter, but only when used naturally.

Instead of dumping screenshots, integrate proof into stories:

Client transformations
Before-and-after scenarios
Common objections you’ve solved

Social proof works best when it answers doubts, not when it feels forced.

Avoid Chasing Trends Blindly

Trends can boost visibility, but only if they align with your brand and audience.

Jumping on every trend confuses positioning and wastes effort. Use trends selectively, as tools, not strategies.

Relevance beats novelty every time.

Convert Attention Into Action

Growth doesn’t happen unless people know what to do next.

Every profile and post should guide users toward:

A website
A message
A booking link
An email signup

Clear calls to action turn attention into outcomes. Without them, engagement stays empty.

Conclusion

Social media growth isn’t complex, it’s disciplined.

Businesses that grow:

Communicate clearly
Post consistently
Provide real value
Engage genuinely
Adjust based on feedback.

There are no shortcuts. But there are simple systems that work when applied patiently.

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Tech

Figure Skating at Winter Olympics 2026 Free Streams: How to watch Milano Cortina

Published

1 hour ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Ilia Malinin could end up being to Milano Cortina what Leon Marchand was to Paris 2024. He’s never competed at the Winter Olympics before, but there’s a sense of inevitability about the 21-year-old, who’s nicknamed Quad God because he’s the only skater to have landed a fully rotated quadruple Axel in competition. The two-time world champion is the clear favorite for gold in the men’s singles.

There’s a fascinating three-way tussle to look forward to in the women’s singles. Three-time world champion and 2022 silver medalist Kaori Sakamoto is hoping to glide off into the sunset with her first Olympic gold, but she’ll be competing against Alysa Liu, the former prodigy who retired at the age of 16, came back two years later and quickly dethroned Sakamoto as the new world champion. Compared to those two, Amber Glenn is the underdog, but she’s got the talent to pull off a shock.

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Irish co-founded payments firm Apexx bags $10m from Finch

Published

1 hour ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Finch Capital has previously supported Ireland’s NomuPay, AccountsIQ and Webio.

UK payments company Apexx Global has bagged strategic investment of up to $10m from Dutch VC group Finch Capital.

Apexx, co-founded by Irishman Peter Keenan, specialises in merchant-centric payment orchestration. Its platform enables enterprise merchants to access the entire global payments ecosystem through a single API, it said.

By allowing transactions to route across the ecosystem, the company targets increased acceptance rates, lower processing costs and improved conversion rates.

Investment from Finch comes after the 2016-founded Apexx bagged some big name customers, including Jet2, Iglu.com and Norse Atlantic, towards the end of last year. According to the company, these additions take it to the brink of break-even revenue.

Finch’s investment will be used to power Apexx’s next phase of growth, it said, supporting product innovation and international expansion as the demand for smarter payment orchestration continues to rise.

As part of the investment, Finch Capital managing partner Radboud Vlaar will be joining Apexx Global’s board as chairperson.

“Apexx Global has built a truly differentiated payment orchestration platform with a clear focus on merchant outcomes,” Vlaar said.

“Payments is a global, complex and rapidly evolving space, and Apexx’s ability to intelligently optimise acceptance and cost at scale positions them exceptionally well.”

Finch Capital deals with more than €500m in assets under management and has backed more than 50 portfolio companies across Europe and the US.

It has previously backed companies in Ireland, including the likes of Dublin-based payments company NomuPay, Aylien, which was acquired by analytics company Quantexa in 2023, AccountsIQ, Supply Finance, and Webio, which was acquired by Aryza last year.

“Finch Capital brings exactly the combination of payments expertise, international perspective and growth experience we were looking for,” said Keenan, the Apexx’s CEO.

“This investment is a strong validation of our strategy and technology, and Radboud’s appointment as chairman further strengthens our leadership as we scale globally.

“Our focus remains clear – delivering measurable value for merchants by simplifying payments and driving better outcomes.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

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Tech Moves: Ex-Oracle SVP joins Qualtrics as CEO; Microsoft accessibility chief takes new role

Published

2 hours ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Experience management software giant Qualtrics on Tuesday named Jason Maynard as its new CEO. Maynard previously spent a decade at Oracle, where he was executive vice president of revenue operations.

“I’ve spent 30 years in enterprise software; as a founder, as an analyst on Wall Street, and as an operator helping scale great businesses,” Maynard wrote in a blog post. “I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the biggest shifts in our industry, and right now we’re in the middle of the largest I’ve ever seen.”

Maynard replaces former longtime Qualtrics exec Zig Serafin, who stepped down as CEO in October. He remains vice chairman.

Qualtrics, based in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, helps companies gather data and improve the experiences and interactions that customers, employees, and others have with their products and services. Once publicly traded, Qualtrics was acquired by Silver Lake and Canada Pension Pan Investment Board in a private equity deal in 2023. The company, which employs more than 4,500 globally, has a pending $6.75 billion deal to acquire Press Ganey Forsta.

Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie prepping for the company’s 2023 Accessibility Summit. (Microsoft Photo)

— Jenny Lay-Flurrie is taking a new role at Microsoft, moving from chief accessibility officer to head of the company’s Trusted Technology Group. Lay-Flurrie held her former role for a decade, leading the company’s efforts on accessibility and disability inclusion, and has been at Microsoft since 2005.

“In every role, one principle has grounded me: – do the right thing,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “I am humbled and excited to take on this next challenge, staying true to that north star. Don’t worry, I’ll remain deeply engaged with my beloved #accessibility community, while learning so much more from other passionate communities I’m honoured to lead.”

Microsoft CVP Teresa Hutson previously led the Trusted Technology Group, which focuses on privacy, safety, regulatory, responsible AI use, and other related topics.

— Former Nintex CEO Amit Mathradas started his new role as CEO of Five9, a Bay Area customer experience software company. Mathradas led Bellevue-based Nintex for three years and was previously COO at Avalara.

— Michelle Flandreau expanded her role at Holland America Line and is now vice president of marketing and e-commerce. Flandreau joined the cruise giant last year and previously held marketing leadership roles at Expedia, Tommy Bahama, LiquidPlanner, and Guidant Financial.

— Amir Moftakhar, former CFO at Modern Hydrogen, is now CFO at AMP, a Colorado-based climate tech company. Moftakhar joined Modern Hydrogen in 2023. The Seattle-area company recently laid off most of its staff.

— Seattle-based cleantech nonprofit VertueLab hired Kris Licciardello as partnerships and alliances lead for Washington state and named Leo Ochoa in the same role leading Oregon efforts. It also hired Jasmin Smith as its Oregon program director.

— Seattle-based edtech company Gravyty added two execs: Former TalkingPoints and Instructure exec Matt Carlson as chief sales officer and former Uptempo CFO Ashley Jones Lee as chief financial officer. Gravyty, which originally started in Boston and raised cash from K1 Investment Management, merged with Ivy.ai and Ocelot last year.

— Seattle startup Yoodli hired Alan Camperson as its new head of global customer support. Camperson was previously a director of technical support at Salesloft. Yoodli, which just raised $40 million, also hired Meg Cory as a field marketing manager and Cortney Perry as enterprise account executive.

— Alexander Rublowsky, a longtime Seattle-area marketing exec, joined the Northwest Quantum Nexus group as a business development advisor.

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Increase of AI bots on the Internet sparks arms race

Published

2 hours ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Or Lenchner, the CEO of Bright Data, one of the world’s largest web-scraping firms, says that his company’s bots do not collect nonpublic information. Bright Data was previously sued by Meta and X for allegedly improperly scraping content from their platforms. (Meta later dropped its suit, and a federal judge in California dismissed the case brought by X.)

Karolis Stasiulevičiu, a spokesperson for another cited company, ScrapingBee, told WIRED: “ScrapingBee operates on one of the Internet’s core principles: that the open web is meant to be accessible. Public web pages are, by design, readable by both humans and machines.”

Oxylabs, another scraping firm, said in an unsigned statement that its bots don’t have “access to content behind logins, paywalls, or authentication. We require customers to use our services only for accessing publicly available information, and we enforce compliance standards throughout our platform.”

Oxylabs added that there are many legitimate reasons for firms to scrape web content, including for cybersecurity purposes and to conduct investigative journalism. The company also says that the countermeasures some websites use do not discriminate between different use cases. “The reality is that many modern anti-bot systems don’t distinguish well between malicious traffic and legitimate automated access,” Oxylabs says.

In addition to causing headaches for publishers, the web-scraping wars are creating new business opportunities. TollBit’s report found more than 40 companies that are now marketing bots that can collect web content for AI training or other purposes. The rise of AI-powered search engines, as well as tools like OpenClaw, are likely helping drive up demand for these services.

Some firms promise to help companies surface content for AI agents rather than try to block them, a strategy known as generative engine optimization, or GEO. “We’re essentially seeing the rise of a new marketing channel,” says Uri Gafni, chief business officer of Brandlight, a company that optimizes content so that it appears prominently in AI tools.

“This will only intensify in 2026, and we’re going to see this rollout kind of as a full-on marketing channel, with search, ads, media, and commerce converging,” Gafni says.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Microsoft to shut down Exchange Online EWS in April 2027

Published

3 hours ago

6 February 2026

NewsAdmin

Exchange

Microsoft announced today that the Exchange Web Services (EWS) API for Exchange Online will be shut down in April 2027, after nearly 20 years.

EWS is a cross-platform API for developing apps that can access Exchange mailbox items, such as email messages, meetings, and contacts, retrieved from various sources, including Exchange Online and on-premises editions of Exchange (starting with Exchange Server 2007).

Microsoft will begin blocking Exchange Online EWS by default on October 1, 2026, but administrators can temporarily maintain access via an application allowlist. The final shutdown occurs on April 1, 2027, with no exceptions granted.

Administrators who create allow lists and configure settings by the end of August 2026 will be excluded from the automatic October blocking. Starting in September 2026, Microsoft will pre-populate allow lists for organizations that have not created their own, based on each tenant’s usage patterns.

The company may also conduct temporary “scream tests” that temporarily disable EWS to expose hidden dependencies before the final cutoff, and will keep IT admins informed via monthly Message Center notifications that provide tenant-specific reminders and usage summaries.

However, it’s important to note that this retirement process affects only Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online environments, and EWS will continue to function in on-premises Exchange Server installations.

“Today we’re announcing we will use a phased, admin controllable disablement plan that starts in October 2026 and concludes with a complete shutdown of EWS in 2027,” the Exchange Team said on Thursday. “EWS was built nearly 20 years ago, and while it served the ecosystem well, it no longer aligns with today’s security, scale, or reliability requirements.”

Microsoft also advised developers using the EWS API to switch to the Microsoft Graph API until EWS is retired, since it has reached near-complete feature parity with EWS for most scenarios.

“EWS is not being retired on-prem. Hybrid scenarios vary depending on how apps access data. On-prem mailboxes may continue using EWS; cloud mailboxes must move to Graph. Autodiscover will help apps determine mailbox location automatically,” Microsoft added.

“But note that only Exchange SE will support Graph for calls to Exchange Online, so hybrid customers will have to use Exchange SE to host on-premises mailboxes.”

Today’s announcement comes after Microsoft revealed in September 2023 that it planned to begin retiring the EWS API in October 2026, and after a 2018 warning that EWS would stop receiving functionality updates.

Three years later, in October 2021, Microsoft revealed that it had deprecated the 25 least-used EWS APIs for Exchange Online and removed support for them in March 2022 for security reasons.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

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