First, we are eliminating 268 roles across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the XGS management and central functions layer.

Matt Booty put that in an email to Xbox staff on Tuesday morning. Microsoft published the memo in full on Xbox Wire the same day, under the title Continuing Our Reset.

Booty is Xbox’s chief content officer. He wrote that he is deeply grateful for what colleagues have built, and knows how difficult the day will be for those leaving. His memo runs to three parts. The job cuts come first, then a reorganisation of the studios, then an update on the ones Microsoft is trying to sell.

Aaron Holmes had the cuts first. Hours before the memo went out, he reported for The Information that Xbox planned to lay off hundreds of staff. It would also consolidate several studios, he wrote, citing someone briefed on the plans.

268 is only the gaming figure

Microsoft cut more than that on Tuesday. Ashley Stewart put the company-wide figure at around 500 employees, writing in Business Insider. A small number of the roles sat outside gaming, in units such as cloud and AI.

Todd Bishop put it slightly higher. Microsoft described the total as fewer than 600 globally, he reported for GeekWire, with about 300 in Washington state. Cuts also landed in marketing and research.

Microsoft’s own memo gives only the 268.

Activision takes the next Halo

The reorganisation moves Xbox’s biggest franchise out of the studio built to make it.

Activision will develop the next Halo title, Booty wrote, using a new team that is separate from Call of Duty. Activision also picks up Rare, which makes Sea of Thieves, and World’s Edge, which looks after Age of Empires.

Halo Studios does not close. A small team stays to support the community and the games already on sale.

Rob Kostich, Activision’s president, set out the brief in a statement.

For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.

He said the team is already being assembled.

Halo has moved studios before

Halo launched in 2001 alongside the first Xbox, made by Bungie. Bungie left in 2007, after Halo 3. Cecilia D’Anastasio and Jason Schreier reported for Bloomberg that Microsoft then formed 343 Industries to carry the series on.

That studio was renamed Halo Studios. Its games have been expensive, irregular and hard to sell to fans, according to Bloomberg. The most recent release was Halo: Campaign Evolved, a remake of the original, which arrived in July.

Two analysts gave the BBC their read. Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief of The Game Business, said Halo was once Xbox’s crown jewel. It had not been one for more than a decade, he said.

Dring said putting the series under Activision makes sense. His caveat was that the company should be mindful not to lose what makes Halo unique.

Jez Corden of Windows Central called the change a dramatic move. Halo was once to Xbox what Mario is to Nintendo, he told the BBC, but years of mismanagement have eroded that.

Three more studios change hands

Bethesda absorbs Obsidian, the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas. Booty wrote that it keeps its current projects, including Grounded and a new Fallout game made with Bethesda Game Studios.

King, which makes Candy Crush, takes Microsoft Casual Games.

Playground and Turn 10 merge into a single studio for Forza and Fable. Booty described the two as creative and franchise partners for over a decade.

Ninja Theory faces closure

The third part of the memo covers the studios Microsoft is trying to sell.

Two separate agreements to sell Ninja Theory fell through. Microsoft will now open consultation with employees on a proposed closure, Booty wrote, while continuing to explore other paths forward.

The Cambridge studio made Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and won a Bafta for it. It was one of the five studios put up in June.

Arkane, in Lyon, is still in consultation, which Booty expects to run to the end of the year. French law obliged Microsoft to open that process first, Kris Holt noted in Engadget. Only then can it decide whether to sell, spin out or close the studio.

Three of the five got out. Compulsion and Double Fine went back to their management in August with their intellectual property, back catalogues and runway funding. Undead Labs has now done the same.

State of Decay 3 will launch day one on Game Pass under a new publisher.

Independence came at a price. Undead Labs said on LinkedIn that it meant saying goodbye to a significant number of colleagues, and declined to say how many.

There have been far too many announcements like this across the industry, and we hate adding to that list. These are people we’d hire again in a heartbeat, and we hope the industry takes notice.

Three quarters of the way through

Booty wrote that the actions completed since July, including the divestitures, bring Xbox roughly three-quarters of the way through the restructuring it announced this summer.

That programme covers 3,200 jobs and five studios, about a fifth of the division.

Asha Sharma, Xbox’s chief executive, told staff in July that the business was not healthy. Xbox was running at margins three to 10 times lower than comparable businesses, she wrote, according to Bloomberg. We must reset Xbox, she added.

The warning signs were already on the record. Microsoft was considering a spin-off in June, when the division’s margins hit 3%. It had raised console prices three times in 13 months. In July it admitted that cloud gaming had not worked yet.

Booty ended the memo with a date. Xbox holds a town hall on 6 October, where he says the team will look ahead to one of the strongest line-ups in its history.

Alongside its Android 17 announcement, Google has introduced Googlebook – its newest laptop series.

Designed for Gemini Intelligence, Googlebook promises to bring together Chrome, Google Play and a modern OS into a range of laptops that are all built with premium materials. Googlebook looks like a natural successor to Google’s 15 year old Chromebook series, and claims to be more of an “intelligence system” rather than merely an operating system.

If you want a deeper dive into Googlebook, make sure you visit our Googlebook vs Chromebook and Googlebook vs Windows 11 guides. If you’re not sold on a Googlebook then our list of the best laptops and best budget laptops should have you covered.

When will Googlebooks launch?

Google has recently unveiled the first wave of Googlebooks, and you can see a full list of models in our Googlebook launch guide. At the time of writing, there are five official Googlebooks including:

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• Acer Googlebook 14
• Dell XPS Googlebook
• Asus Googlebook 14
• Lenovo Googlebook 15
• HP Googlebook 14

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While they’re not currently available to order just yet, we expect availability to begin from October 2026 in the UK and US.

How much will a Googlebook cost?

When Google first announced Googlebook, we hoped that the laptop range would be as affordable as Chromebooks which can be found for as low as £249/$179. Plus, Chromebooks can be found on our best budget laptops and best student laptops guides, meaning they’re not only cheap but also offer solid performance too. However, unfortunately as RAM prices are still climbing and availability is scarce, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Googlebooks aren’t quite as cheap and cheerful as we dared to hope.

The cheapest Googlebook, the Acer Googlebook 14, starts at $899/£999 while the priciest models from Asus and HP will set you back around the $1199 to $1299 (£1099 to £1199) mark.

Which brands will launch Googlebooks?

Google has stated that Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo will be the first brands to launch their own GAcer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo are the first brands to launch their own Googlebooks.

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Google has explained that all Googlebooks, regardless of the manufacturer, will be identifiable by a glowbar that acts as an at-a-glance indicator of your battery, a G Key and authentication methods to keep your Googlebook secure and private. Those methods include a fingerprint sensor and, for some models, face authentication too.

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In addition, every Googlebook promises to be built with “premium craftsmanship and materials” like aluminium and magnesium, will be fitted with at least 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD storage and will see a minimum of 14 hours battery.

A Chinese-speaking threat actor has been exploiting vulnerabilities in ZyXEL GS1900 Smart Managed Switches and WordPress to steal sensitive data from 996 devices and more than 18,500 records stored in backend databases.

The adversary targeted multiple technologies, including PAN-OS Global Protect, FlowiseAI, Nuclio, Proxmox, Ubiquity, with exploits for known security issues.

Scans and attacks attributed to the adversary originate from the same IP address and have been recorded since early June 2026, and have been attributed to a threat actor related to the Red Heron group, linked to exploiting a critical flaw in the Gitea self-hosted Git service.

The activity was detected by threat intelligence company GreyNoise through its Global Observation Grid (GOG) network of sensors.

According to the researchers, the threat actor leveraged the wp2shell vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137) in the WordPress Core component to breach at least 49 organizations in 29 countries.

Public exploits for wp2shell became available in mid-July, and active exploitation was observed a few days later. The campaign GreyNoise observed started around the same time, targeting high-value entities.

While many targets were in the small business and government sectors, one intrusion at an unnamed Western government organization stands out.

The attacker used a custom wp2shell exploit and performed extensive Windows and security reconnaissance, checking Microsoft Defender, AMSI, available services, listening ports, local accounts, application restrictions, and database configuration.

Over 36 minutes, the threat actor tried 17 scripts to bypass AMSI, escalate privileges through token impersonation or theft, create a local administrator, and extract registry data, GreyNoise says.

After locating credentials for a backend SQL database, the attackers used them in a password-spraying attack that gave them access to an internal SQL server, from which they stole at least 18,566 records.

According to the researchers, the data contained accounts, plaintext passwords, and personally identifiable information (PII) connected to government and law-enforcement agencies.

The same attacker breached a Russian state organization in occupied Ukraine, which the researchers described as a “red-on-red” compromise.

Exploiting multiple flaws

On August 17, the threat actor started to exploit a high-severity flaw (CVE-2026-7273) in ZyXEL GS1900 Smart Managed Switches and compromised 996 devives in 48 countries to extract device configurations, network information, and hashed root-level credentials.

Additionally, the hackers attempted to chain the Ubiquiti UniFi OS vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, and CVE-2026-34910 to obtain root-level remote code execution.

CISA has flagged the three Ubiquiti flaws as actively exploited since late June 2026.

GreyNoise also confirmed targeting of PAN-OS GlobalProtect, FlowiseAI (CVE-2026-56271), the Linux kernel’s Dirty Pipe flaw (CVE-2022-0847), Gitea (CVE-2026-60004), Nuclio (CVE-2026-79756), SENAITE LIMS (CVE-2026-54569) and Proxmox VE (CVE-2023-54391).

The researchers highlight that not all security issues leveraged in attacks linked to this threat cluster have been added to CISA’s catalog of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV).

GreyNoise has provided a set of indicators of compromise (IoCs) connected to the observed activity, which include hashes for backdoors and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

Save your seat

Amgen’s Christine O’Sullivan and Angela Jenkins discuss the impact a strong network can have when forging a career.

According to Christine O’Sullivan, an operations transformation senior manager at Amgen, networking is key to building relationships, particularly in larger organisations, as no one should work in isolation. 

O’Sullivan told SiliconRepublic.com: “We rely on people across different functions who share different expertise, experience and perspectives. Building those relationships helps us understand more about the wider business, but it also makes it much easier to collaborate and to get things done when we need to.

“And that’s probably the simplest way I’d describe the value of networking, very few of us are going to achieve anything meaningful entirely on our own.”

For Angela Jenkins, a senior manager for quality and compliance, said that at its core, networking – while it sounds very formal – is really just about making connections. 

She said: “If you’re an introvert it can be daunting, but it’s about striking up a conversation when you’re in the queue for a sandwich at the canteen or engaging with a colleague over coffee to find out what’s going on in their part of the business.

“This is an effective way to get to know different people across the business. Those small interactions are often how relationships start. Having a good network is essential to accessing expertise. You may not have the answer to a technical question, but you might know someone who knows someone else who has the answer. 

“You build these connections across your working life, and then you can tap into that network for advice and guidance. Sometimes, it provides the answer to a question and on other occasions, it opens a door to a new opportunity.”

Who typically benefits from work-based networking initiatives?

O’Sullivan: Everyone benefits from networking, but it can be particularly valuable if you don’t have an established network, maybe you’re early in your career, new to the company, or have moved function or location. As you progress, those relationships will help you navigate and work across different parts of the business.

And importantly, networking is a two-way street. We all bring different experiences and perspectives. A digital native and someone with 20 years’ industry experience will learn different things from each other. That applies to leaders too, networking gives them direct access to emerging talent and fresh perspectives on topics like AI and new ways of working.

Jenkins: Work-based initiatives are beneficial because they provide structure and complement informal networking. You know that if you attend an event, you’ll meet leadership or colleagues from a different department or function. Participating in these structured events helps to light the sparks that ignite relationships and allow colleagues to connect informally. 

For example, if you are transitioning into a new role, you might know about the role itself, but if you have previously met a colleague who works in this function at a work-based initiative, they could provide the information that you need. Having a network gives you the benefit of people who you can reach out to for the tacit knowledge and context about how the teams connect and who have expertise. You wouldn’t be able to get this kind of information without building those relationships.

How can companies create an environment in which networking is fully integrated? 

O’Sullivan: Networking works best when there’s a mix of formal and informal opportunities. At Amgen, we also have a mentorship programme and I’ve found this particularly valuable when you connect with someone from a different part of the business who can bring a completely different perspective. So, while formal networking events are great for making connections, the informal side, the conversations and relationships you build over time, is just as important.

Jenkins: Networking works when it becomes part of everyday working life rather than something you only do at a networking event. It’s important for new joiners to take part in the non-work related activities that are part of everyday life at Amgen, as well as taking part in cross-functional projects which are brilliant for self-development.

When we view networking as being integrated into everything that we do, it means that colleagues are comfortable saying: “I’m really interested in what I heard you say in that meeting, can we have a chat about it?” People are willing to have those conversations regardless of organisation or level, and that openness is ultimately what drives our workplace culture.

How might networking events encourage less experienced employees to develop crucial future skills?

O’Sullivan: Networking events are a great way for junior colleagues to meet senior leaders. Regardless of whether the events are virtual or in-person, they also provide opportunities for junior employees to introduce themselves and to hear perspectives from across the business. 

Jenkins: Amgen offers numerous pathways for young professionals to develop soft skills like communication and public speaking. For example, our networking events provide an opportunity for junior colleagues to practice their personal ‘elevator pitch’ to senior leaders; where they explain their role, and that of their team, in the context of the impact to the business.

In-person meetings have an added benefit for junior colleagues: it allows them to see how successful presenters and leaders deliver their messages, they can see the eye contact across the table and the nodding in the room. 

What advice do you have for an individual who might find networking to be challenging?

O’Sullivan: Be authentic. I see that a lot of people network very naturally without realising it, so just being yourself is the best approach. You don’t have to walk into a room thinking, “I need to talk to 20 people”. Start with one good conversation. Be curious, ask what someone is working on, how they got involved or what they’ve learned along the way. That takes some of the pressure off and makes networking feel much more natural.

Jenkins: Be curious. Ask someone about their role, how they got there or what they’re working on. And don’t underestimate what you bring to the conversation either. If you have knowledge or expertise in a particular area, share it.

For example, if there’s a piece of technology you know a lot about, tell people. This is an effective way of networking because your colleagues will let other people know about your expertise. It’s also important to be consistent, spend a few minutes at the start of a meeting to introduce yourself to a colleague and then send them a follow-up note afterwards. Closing the loop is an underrated networking skill and it can spark the beginning of a productive two-way relationship.

How might you gauge how successful or unsuccessful a networking event has been?

O’Sullivan: It’s not just about how many people show up but the relationships that are forged. If you come away having made two meaningful new connections, gained a different perspective or learned something new, that’s valuable. The real measure is what happens afterwards, whether you continue those conversations and build on the relationships you’ve made.

Jenkins: It depends where you are on your professional journey. Our events tend to have a wide range of attendees, encompassing every career stage from executive directors to graduates. If you are a new hire, these initiatives are a great way to make valuable connections and to learn about key career development, influencing and communication skills. Similarly, attending an event can make graduates feel comfortable and give them the confidence they need at the start of their careers.

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£42 is a hefty amount to save on a security camera that never needs a cable run or a monthly bill.

That saving belongs to the Reolink Argus PT Ultra plus Solar Panel, a 4K battery security camera that has fallen from £139.99 to £97.99, which you can now get with a 30% discount that matches its lowest price in three months.