Microsoft is in the news again, and if you’re familiar at all with that company, you know that means bad news. (What’s the last time Microsoft news being good news? Ballmer stepping down? The release of Windows 3.1?)
First up: Founder and Jeffrey Epstein bud Bill Gates says that AI could kill a billion people.
In an exclusive Meet the Press interview set to air this weekend, the Microsoft co-founder told Kristen Welker that artificial intelligence is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that… cause a billion deaths” – then used the line to demand federal legislation, law-enforcement monitoring, and an end to industry self-regulation.
Gates is touting AI as a species-level emergency, and calling for handing over total control to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.
Welker put the extinction question to him directly: “Do you believe AI is powerful enough to end all of humanity?”
Gates answered: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths, you know, so even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
Of course. This is part of the AI psy-op in which some AI megacorps argue that AI is so dangerous that you have to go regulate those other megacorps, and we have just the regulators to do it.
This from the founder of a company whose AI offering is so bad their own devs don’t want to use it, and who just fixed almost a thousand security holes this month alone. Worse still, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be able to carry out such basic, far-less-complex-than-AI tasks as retaining customer data.
Microsoft accidentally wiped some nonprofit customers’ M365 data before their retention period expired – and now says it cannot tell them what disappeared, or even whether they lost anything.
The cockup followed Microsoft’s retirement of its Microsoft 365 Business Premium grant, which gave eligible nonprofits ten free licenses for the productivity suite.
Microsoft announced in May 2025 that the grant would not renew after July 1 that year. It offered eligible nonprofits up to 300 free Microsoft 365 Business Basic licenses, alongside discounted pricing for plans including Business Premium.
The company urged customers to move users onto another nonprofit plan before cancellation to avoid disruption or data loss. Organizations could also export anything they did not intend to retain in Microsoft 365.
The problem arose after the subscriptions were deactivated. In an email to one affected customer seen by The Register, Microsoft admitted that, “due to an error,” it had deleted remaining data before the retention and export window closed. Attempts to recover it had failed.
“We have now investigated the recovery options, but unfortunately, the data cannot be recovered,” Microsoft said.
Redmond cannot determine what disappeared either. The company said it was “currently unable to provide a list showing which data may have been deleted or whether any data was deleted at all.” It could say only that the problem involved expired Business Premium subscriptions.
“Keep from deleting customer data” should be a task tens of orders of magnitude easier than “preventing Skynet.” Yet Microsoft can’t even handle that.
This is time, yet again, to reiterate that leaving all your data in “the Cloud” without backing it up locally is an incredibly stupid idea.
You should backup your data. You should have multiple backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data saved to different types of backup media. Ideally, you should have multiple rolling or rotating backups of your data saved to different types of backup media including off-site backups.
To make the salient points yet again: 1. When you store your data in “the Cloud,” you’re simply storing your data on someone else’s computer. 2. Cloud storage should never be your only data backup solution.
Never rely on a single point of failure for your data. Especially when that single point is Microsoft.
