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In the same month, Microsoft acquired Australia-based video editing software company Clipchamp. The increased necessity for remote work and distance education drove demand for cloud computing and grew the company's gaming sales. In February 2019, hundreds of Microsoft employees protested the company's war profiteering from a $480 million contract to develop virtual reality headsets for the United States Army. In May 2018, Microsoft partnered with 17 American intelligence agencies to develop cloud computing products. Increasingly present in the hardware business following Xbox, Microsoft 2006 released the Zune series of digital media players, a successor of its previous software platform Portable Media Center. It has been criticized for monopolistic practices, and the company's software received criticism for problems with ease of use, robustness, and security.
Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of approximately 228,000 passionate employees worldwide. Get must-have apps to enhance your gaming experience with Twitch, Nitrado, Air Server, and Dolby Atmos. The probe scrutinized Microsoft's bundling of cloud services with products like Office and security tools, as well as its growing AI presence through its partnership with OpenAI. The European Commission issued a statement of objections, alleging Microsoft's practice since 2019 gave Teams an unfair market advantage and limited interoperability with competing software.
Intune for Education is a new cloud-based application and device management service for the education sector. On March 1, 2016, Microsoft announced the merger of its PC and Xbox divisions, with Phil Spencer announcing that Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps would be the focus for Microsoft's gaming in the future. Since Nadella became CEO, the company has changed focus towards cloud computing. On September 3, 2013, Microsoft agreed to buy Nokia's mobile unit for $7 billion, following Amy Hood taking the role of CFO. To cope with the potential for an increase in demand for products and services, Microsoft opened a number of "holiday stores" across the U.S. to complement the increasing number of "bricks-and-mortar" Microsoft Stores that opened in 2012.
Dame Margaret Hodge, a Labour MP in the UK said, "It is unsurprising – yet still shocking – that massively wealthy global corporations openly, unashamedly and blatantly refuse to pay tax on the profits they make in the countries where they undertake business". This is due to the company being tax resident in Bermuda as mentioned in the accounts for 'Microsoft Round Island One, a subsidiary that collects license fees from the use of Microsoft software worldwide. As reported by several news outlets, an Irish subsidiary of Microsoft based in the Republic of Ireland declared £220 bn in profits but paid no corporation tax for the year 2020. This characterization is derived from the perception that Microsoft provides nearly everything for its employees in a convenient place, but in turn overworks them to a point where it would be bad for their (possibly long-term) health. The company is often referred to as a "Velvet Sweatshop", a term which originated in a 1989 Seattle Times article, and later became used to describe the company by some of Microsoft's own employees. Historically, Microsoft has also been accused of overworking employees, in many cases, leading to burnout within just a few years of joining the company.
Microsoft stated that the underlying cause had been fixed but acknowledged ongoing residual impacts on some Microsoft 365 apps and services. The outage was traced back to a flawed update of CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software, which resulted in Microsoft systems crashing and causing disruptions across various sectors. On July 19, a global IT outage impacted Microsoft services, affecting businesses, airlines, and financial institutions worldwide. Meanwhile, that month, the company announced a subscription offering of artificial intelligence for small businesses via Copilot Pro. However, the plan was short-lived, as Altman was subsequently reinstated as OpenAI's CEO and Brockman rejoined the company amid pressure from OpenAI's employees and investors on its board. The service includes Copilot, a GPT-4 based large language model tool to query and visualize data, write code, initiate simulations, and educate researchers.
The announcement came a day after hosting a Sting concert for 50 people, including Microsoft executives, in Davos, Switzerland. In January 2023, CEO Satya Nadella announced Microsoft would lay off 10,000 employees. Microsoft also named Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox brand since 2014, the inaugural CEO of the newly established Microsoft Gaming division, which now houses the Xbox operations team and the three publishers in the company's portfolio (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, Activision Blizzard). December also saw the company discontinue the Microsoft Edge [Legacy] browser project in favor of the "New Edge" browser project, featuring a Chromium based backend. In the same month, Microsoft announced the open source implementation of Windows Forms and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which will allow for further movement of the company toward the transparent release of key frameworks used in developing Windows desktop applications and software. In December 2018, Microsoft announced Project Mu, an open source release of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) core used in Microsoft Surface and Hyper-V products. In February 2018, Microsoft ceased notification support for its Windows Phone devices which effectively ended firmware updates for the discontinued devices.
At Microsoft Build 2026 in June 2026, Microsoft announced the preview availability of Azure Cobalt 200 virtual machines, its second-generation Arm-based custom CPU, offering up to 135% better performance for cloud database workloads and 50% overall CPU performance improvement over the previous generation Cobalt 100. On 9 March 2026, Microsoft unveiled the Copilot Cowork tool, which is based on Claude Cowork, tapping into the growing demand for autonomous agents. In March 2026, Microsoft-controlled discussion forums banned the nickname Microslop, used to express pushback against Microsoft's Copilot-based and GenAI efforts. In June 2025, a United Nations report on corporations complicit in the Gaza genocide showed that Microsoft was one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction." In mid-2025, Microsoft's Russian division, Microsoft Rus LLC, filed for bankruptcy after President Vladimir Putin stated that foreign services providers should be throttled in Russia to make way for domestic software.
Additional offices are located in Bellevue and Issaquah, Washington (90,000 employees worldwide). It is estimated to encompass over 8 million ft2 (750,000 m2) of office space and 30,000–40,000 employees. The group, accessed "a very small percentage" of Microsoft corporate email accounts, which also included members of its senior leadership team and employees in its cybersecurity and legal teams.

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