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Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs as Tencent open-sources Hy3; Ukraine pleads for air defenses

Microsoft is starting its 2026 financial year with another round of layoffs, cutting roughly 4,800 employees, or about 2.1 percent of its workforce [1]. The reductions hit hardest in the Xbox and commercial sales divisions, with around 1,600 Xbox roles eliminated immediately and

Microsoft is starting its 2026 financial year with another round of layoffs, cutting roughly 4,800 employees, or about 2.1 percent of its workforce [1]. The reductions hit hardest in the Xbox and commercial sales divisions, with around 1,600 Xbox roles eliminated immediately and plans to cut roughly 20 percent of Xbox jobs by year-end [1]. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in an internal memo that the cuts reflect a changing technology industry and the need to shift how Microsoft operates as AI reshapes work, while insisting the eliminated roles are not being replaced by AI [1]. The company is also selling four Xbox studios and considering the sale of another as it tries to "reset" its gaming business [1].

In AI, Tencent released the full version of its Hy3 model under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, a reversal from an earlier preview that had more restrictive terms [2]. The 295-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model has 21 billion active parameters and a 256,000-token context window [2]. Tencent claims Hy3 leads open-weight models on agentic search and tool-use benchmarks, though it still trails Zhipu AI's larger GLM-5.2 on coding tasks [2]. The company also highlighted production-reliability metrics, saying hallucination rates dropped from 12.5 percent to 5.4 percent and commonsense errors fell from 25.4 percent to 12.7 percent compared with the preview [2].

On the world stage, Ukraine is warning of a critical shortage of interceptor missiles after a Russian barrage killed at least 23 people in the Kyiv region [3]. The Ukrainian Air Force said none of the 23 ballistic missiles fired at the capital on Sunday night were shot down, though cruise missiles and drones were intercepted [3]. President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for "strong decisions" at this week's NATO summit in Ankara, arguing that Patriot missiles sitting in allied stockpiles could stop the strikes [3].

In other tech news, NASA launched a robotic rescue mission on Friday to save the Swift Observatory, which is falling back to Earth because expanded atmospheric drag from increased solar activity has lowered its orbit from 373 miles to about 220 miles [4]. The LINK spacecraft, built by Katalyst Space, will attempt to grapple the telescope and gently raise its orbit over several months [4]. Nintendo also confirmed it will stop selling all original Switch models in Europe from mid-February 2027, citing new EU battery regulations, while introducing user-replaceable battery versions of the Switch 2 and controllers [5].

Let me count words. That's about 380 words. Good.

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The category is "tech" (lowercase). Tags are reasonable.

One thing: the date should be 2026-07-07 based on current date. Good.

Let me also double-check the NASA source - I fetched it via search but didn't web_fetch it. I have the search result content which is sufficient, but to be safe I should cite it. I did retrieve the search result. The instructions say "Cite only sources you actually retrieved." I retrieved the search result for it, which counts. But maybe I should fetch it to be fully safe. Let me fetch it quickly.

🌐 Fetching page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0ry4xx7rk8o

🌐 Fetching page: https://www.theverge.com/games/961632/nintendo-switch-europe-discontinued

title: "Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs as Tencent open-sources Hy3; Ukraine pleads for air defenses" date: 2026-07-07 category: "tech" tags: ["microsoft", "tencent", "ai", "ukraine", "xbox", "nintendo", "nasa"] sources: - "https://www.theverge.com/news/961528/microsoft-layoffs-july-2026-sales-xbox" - "https://venturebeat.com/technology/tencents-apache-licensed-hy3-takes-on-glm-5-2-at-half-the-size-and-wins-everywhere-except-coding" - "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cewqqnd7zdwo" - "https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0ry4xx7rk8o" - "https://www.theverge.com/games/961632/nintendo-switch-europe-discontinued"

Microsoft is starting its 2026 financial year with another round of layoffs, cutting roughly 4,800 employees, or about 2.1 percent of its workforce [1]. The reductions hit hardest in the Xbox and commercial sales divisions, with around 1,600 Xbox roles eliminated immediately and plans to cut roughly 20 percent of Xbox jobs by year-end [1]. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in an internal memo that the cuts reflect a changing technology industry and the need to shift how Microsoft operates as AI reshapes work, while insisting the eliminated roles are not being replaced by AI [1]. The company is also selling four Xbox studios and considering the sale of another as it tries to "reset" its gaming business [1].

In AI, Tencent released the full version of its Hy3 model under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, a reversal from an earlier preview that had more restrictive terms [2]. The 295-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model has 21 billion active parameters and a 256,000-token context window [2]. Tencent claims Hy3 leads open-weight models on agentic search and tool-use benchmarks, though it still trails Zhipu AI's larger GLM-5.2 on coding tasks [2]. The company also highlighted production-reliability metrics, saying hallucination rates dropped from 12.5 percent to 5.4 percent and commonsense errors fell from 25.4 percent to 12.7 percent compared with the preview [2].

On the world stage, Ukraine is warning of a critical shortage of interceptor missiles after a Russian barrage killed at least 23 people in the Kyiv region [3]. The Ukrainian Air Force said none of the 23 ballistic missiles fired at the capital on Sunday night were shot down, though cruise missiles and drones were intercepted [3]. President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed for "strong decisions" at this week's NATO summit in Ankara, arguing that Patriot missiles sitting in allied stockpiles could stop the strikes [3].

In other tech news, NASA launched a robotic rescue mission on Friday to save the Swift Observatory, which is falling back to Earth because expanded atmospheric drag from increased solar activity has lowered its orbit from 373 miles to about 220 miles [4]. The LINK spacecraft, built by Katalyst Space, will attempt to grapple the telescope and gently raise its orbit over several months [4]. Nintendo also confirmed it will stop selling all original Switch models in Europe from mid-February 2027, citing new EU battery regulations, while introducing user-replaceable battery versions of the Switch 2 and controllers [5].

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