Microsoft’s Strategic Layoffs: Innovation and Efficiency in the AI Era

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This Week in IT, Microsoft is set to layoff underperforming employees, website certificates could be set to expire much faster, and Microsoft urges orgs to patch AD domain controllers as a new vulnerability is identified.

Episode overview

This week’s IT news highlights Microsoft’s plans for layoffs, changes to website certificate expiration, and a new Active Directory vulnerability.

Patch Recommendations: Microsoft recommends patching servers promptly or blocking LDAP and RPC at the firewall level if patching is not possible.
Microsoft Layoffs: Microsoft plans to lay off underperforming employees in 2025, including those in the security division, while replacing them with more efficient roles.
Impact of AI: There is speculation that Microsoft’s layoffs might be influenced by efficiency gains from AI technologies like co-pilot.
Website Certificates: Apple and Google are advocating for website certificates to expire every 45 days to increase security and prevent hackers from taking over orphan domains.
Industry Skepticism: The industry is skeptical about the effectiveness of the proposed 45-day certificate expiration in significantly improving security.
Active Directory Vulnerability: Safe Breach identified a new vulnerability in Active Directory that could crash Windows Server domain controllers, which Microsoft has patched in the December updates.

Russell Smith

Editorial Director at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Russell has more than 20 years' experience working in IT. From small business to large government IT infrastructure projects. Russell started his writing career for Windows IT Pro magazine in the early 2000s. Since then, Russell has contributed to a variety of publications, including Petri, CDW's list of publications, and various industry blogs including Netwrix, BeyondTrust, and others. In addition to more than 1000 articles Russell has authored, he has also written a book on Windows security and co-authored another for Microsoft's MOAC series. Russell has also authored several courses for Pluralsight.