Within 12 days, the state was able to launch the Washington Healthcare Emergency and Logistics Tracking Hub (WA HEALTH) built on Microsoft Power Platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure.

“This really helped us understand how do we get patients to the right care at the right place in the right amount of time and also to understand the needs for personal protective equipment across the state — who had what and where were the gaps,” Henry said.

Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure are by their nature designed to expand and scale quickly and meet elastic demand. With the more than 60 datacenter regions around the globe — including three new regions announced this past May in Italy, New Zealand and Poland — Microsoft can shift traffic if a natural disaster or power outage affects capacity in one part of the world. Computing hardware to protect against demand spikes is stockpiled in warehouses around the globe, ready to be deployed to where it’s needed most.

By March the epicenter of that demand was in Europe, as countries such as Italy and Spain imposed nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Around the same time, manufacturing issues in China and Southeast Asia due to the global health pandemic created a temporary disruption in the supply chain for certain datacenter hardware as dramatic spikes in usage began challenging computing capacity in some regions. In a Microsoft quarterly earnings call on April 29, the company said those hardware supply chain issues largely began resolving themselves late in the quarter that ended in March.

“The scope and the scale of the response to COVID-19 was completely unprecedented, in terms of how much of the world went digital inside a month,” said Mark Simms, a senior Azure engineer who helped manage the COVID-19 response across Azure. “So the work that we had to do to get through the initial surge in demand and free up capacity for our customers to run critical health and safety workloads was also unprecedented.”

“We made some pretty profound changes in order to do the right thing, and we did them under a very short time frame,” Simms said.

Datacenter employees began working in round-the-clock shifts to install new servers while staying at least six feet apart. Microsoft product teams worked to find any further efficiencies to free up Azure resources for other customers. The company doubled capacity on one of its own undersea cables carrying data across the Atlantic and negotiated with owners of another to open up additional capacity. Network engineers installed new hardware and tripled the deployed capacity on the America Europe Connect cable in just two weeks.

Microsoft’s plan emphasized continuity of service for all its customers, but especially for those on the front lines of the COVID-19 response: health care providers, police and emergency responders, financial institutions, manufacturers of critical supplies, grocery stores and health agencies providing critical information to the public about how quickly the virus was spreading.

The Azure Global and Customer Experience engineering teams mobilized and monitored Azure services around the clock to ensure critical customers could continue to operate smoothly and meet new challenges posed by COVID-19. Employees from across the company volunteered to switch gears to help deploy urgent projects like WA HEALTH.

Microsoft’s Regional Government Emergency Response and Monitoring Solution, on which WA HEALTH was built, uses Microsoft Power Apps Portal and Microsoft Power BI, which run on Azure, to allow healthcare workers to quickly update counts of COVID-19 cases and critical resources at the end of a shift or whenever is convenient through a web portal or by mobile phone.

As the pandemic was unfolding and cases were surging, it allowed state and local health officials to use near-real-time dashboards — based on data from more than 100 acute care hospitals around the state — to coordinate responses. It continues to allow the state to monitor trends, as well as inform decisions such as how quickly counties can move toward safely reopening their economies, Henry said.

“This was a real-time moving event, and people needed to make decisions hour by hour and minute by minute,” said Gary Bird, a principal program manager for Microsoft Power Platform who worked to deploy WA HEALTH. “You really saw the whole company lean in across all fronts to make solutions happen.”

Balancing supply and demand

Once the pandemic hit, Microsoft’s plans to deal with unexpected spikes in usage and expand Azure’s computing resources kicked in. The company began adding new servers to the hardest hit regions and installing new hardware racks 24 hours a day. To protect the health of critical datacenter employees, Microsoft also quickly established social distancing requirements, provided protective equipment and implemented strict disinfectant policies.

Microsoft prioritized capacity for existing customers while also reserving capacity for first responders who needed to quickly scale life and safety services. It also expanded cloud support for non-profits working to protect people’s health during the pandemic.

Microsoft’s Azure and product teams worked around the clock to ensure that services like Teams, Office and Xbox could meet rapidly exploding demand from customers. Next, they looked for efficiencies across all of Microsoft services running on Azure to free up more capacity for external customers.

Microsoft Teams was the first and most obvious service to experience massive growth. But other Azure services that enable remote work, such as Windows Virtual Desktop, which saw its usage triple in one month, and Azure Active Directory’s Application Proxy had to scale those services dramatically as financial institutions, schools, call centers and other companies moved thousands of employees onto those platforms practically overnight.

Not only were new customers signing up, but suddenly existing users were relying on the tools to power every single meeting or interaction in their workday, said Mark Longton, a principal group program manager for Microsoft Teams.

“Teams went from a service that was cool and convenient and something that people realized was the future of communication to very quickly becoming a mission critical, can’t-live-without-it sort of thing,” Longton said. “Really what this did was accelerate us into the future.”

Microsoft Teams began using early data from China and Italy to plan for expected growth as the pandemic spread. As more countries went into lockdown, dozens of Redmond-based Microsoft employees gathered remotely each Sunday night to watch telemetry, look for bottlenecks and troubleshoot as unprecedented numbers of remote European workers began logging in first thing Monday morning.

“Normally, you find and fix issues organically as you grow. When you take software and put it under explosive growth – with services getting used an order of magnitude more in one day — you tend to find all of those in a really short period of time,” said John Sheehan, Microsoft distinguished engineer for Azure quality.

Once critical services were successfully scaled and stabilized, the company shifted to looking for efficiencies. Microsoft opened up performance data for all services running on Azure to engineers across the company, asking them to submit ideas that would allow Microsoft to provide more computing capacity to the wider pool of Azure customers.

In Teams, small tweaks that few customers would notice — lengthening the time it takes for the three dots to appear when someone else is typing in a Teams chat or disabling the feature that suggests a contact every time you type a new letter in the “to” field — made the system run much more leanly. Engineers rewrote the code to make video stream processing 10 times more efficient in a marathon push over a weekend.

Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded.

Bandai Namco has lifted the lid on Jump Force Deluxe Edition‘s Nintendo Switch release date, confirming that it’ll be in our hands from 28th August.

The news comes alongside a brand new trailer, which you can check out for yourself above. The game contains more than 50 playable characters including stars from the likes of Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia, Naruto, One Piece, and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

JUMP FORCE Deluxe Edition features all of the hugely popular characters from the game’s 2019 release, as well as all previously released DLC characters from the Season 1 Characters Pass. With 16 Weekly Shonen Jump franchises gathering a roster of more than 50 playable characters, fans can now take their favourite fighter to the battlefield wherever they want!

Play against friends and foes through both offline and online battles. A new offline 3 vs. 3 mode is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of JUMP FORCE Deluxe Edition, enabling six friends to each control a character and battle it out together. In this mode, each player controls a character on their team of three and will enter the fight when their character is tagged into the battle. Strategic thinking and knowing when to tag players in and out of the battle will be key to winning the fight.

Looking forward to checking this one out in the summer? Have you already played it on other platforms? Tell us below.

Activities

Trials

Nightfall: The Ordeal

UI/UX

Controller Button Remapping

PC & Stadia Settings

Gear Details Subscreen

Wrapped Items Container

Gameplay and Investment

Weapons

Armor

Finishers

Power and Progression

Bounties and Pursuits

Raid Rewards

Vendor

Added the ability to use an Exotic Cipher to purchase a second Fated engram from Xur each week.

Platforms and Systems

General

We’re still a few weeks out from the official release.  No, no official date has been set, but in the meantime, the changes and bugfixes will have to tide us over.  At least worlds opened in 1.16 Pre-release 1 seem like they might be recoverable now.  No promises there.

• Made Nether Fortresses slightly more common
• Food can now be placed on unlit campfires
• Visibility under lava is now slightly better when under the effect of fire resistance
• Piglins now hear you break a chest or block of gold (or similar) even if your are our of line of sight, and will assume you are stealing
• The game will now attempt to recover worlds broken in 1.16 Pre-release 1
• Game rule descriptions now span multiple lines if needed on the game rules screen
• A loading screen is now displayed while the game is reading world data for loading, creating or re-creating a world

• Region files are now only opened in synchronous mode on Windows, not on other operating systems. Status of this feature can be manually controlled by the following options:
• For dedicated servers: sync-chunk-writes within server.properties
• For clients: syncChunkWrites within options.txt

• MC-13823 – Leads are incorrectly positioned on certain entities
• MC-14680 – Lead is shifted upwards or downwards based on leashed entity height
• MC-27535 – Mobs can sometimes still despawn, even if named with a name tag
• MC-84610 – Off-hand hotkey doesn’t work in inventories
• MC-131286 – Attack will use right hand instead of left hand when swimming (main hand: left)
• MC-134608 – Certain Spawner Tag Conditions Induce Game Crash
• MC-143473 – Teleporting a mob while it is pathfinding will make it navigate back to where it was originally going
• MC-152157 – “Marie Stålkrantz” is not the right color in game credits
• MC-159371 – Leads are incorrectly positioned on bees
• MC-159502 – Bees don’t avoid water; killing themselves
• MC-160520 – Bee’s wandering AI tries to go through three-way corners
• MC-163921 – Placing a block while looking at redstone ore plays no sound
• MC-166346 – Transparent blocks do not render properly with tripwire above
• MC-166880 – Pufferfish spikes model seems to be broken
• MC-167043 – Enchantment glint does only apply to the handle of shields with banners
• MC-169008 – Using End portal in the Nether teleports the player to the End, but at the same coordinates the player was in the Nether
• MC-171618 – Players wearing armor take less damage from burning when standing in fire under certain conditions
• MC-171810 – Some Mojang employees are not mentioned in the credits
• MC-171969 – Fall damage is negated when stepping up after falling
• MC-172053 – Nether particles get stuck on the bottom of blocks
• MC-172105 – When a piglin is dancing, targeting or looking at an item, the chestplate the piglin is wearing does not adjust to the piglin’s pose
• MC-172110 – Texture of turtle shells is missing when worn by a piglin or zombified piglin
• MC-172871 – Unable to spawn wither in horizontal arrangement below y level 2
• MC-173310 – Observer powered texture doesn’t match unpowered
• MC-173404 – Desync when mounting an entity while sneaking
• MC-173825 – Bats break turtle eggs
• MC-176094 – Baby zombified piglin chicken jockeys can spawn riding striders
• MC-177336 – ‘Failed to access level’ when opening a world from a CIFS mount on Ubuntu
• MC-177530 – The new minecraft:attributes registry is plural, while all the others are singular
• MC-177542 – Chunk loading and saving is extremely slow when sync-chunk-writes=true
• MC-177626 – Spruce generation is broken
• MC-177694 – Zombified Piglin Spawn Egg is placed before Zombie Villager Spawn Egg in the creative inventory
• MC-177712 – Nether portal blocks do not have loot tables
• MC-177795 – Overworld music can start playing in the Nether
• MC-177863 – Shroomlights cannot be composted
• MC-177876 – Striders are now much rarer
• MC-178010 – Lena Raine does not appear in credits
• MC-178338 – Striders only get warm when lava touches their legs
• MC-179140 – Sea guardians have an odd swimming behavior
• MC-180603 – Wrong structures are generated in superflat worlds
• MC-181630 – Advancement trigger “minecraft:tick” does not support standard “player” predicate
• MC-181813 – Edit “g”ame “r”ules are not capitalized in the Game Rules menu title
• MC-181884 – Falling quickly/Flying with Elytra/Swimming with Riptide Trident and throwing a projectile will cause it to hit the player
• MC-182076 – Horse jumping sound is unused
• MC-182249 – Problems with potted_cactus.json block model file
• MC-182766 – Recipe book search function does not work if recipe book was not open before
• MC-182909 – Esc from Customised World’s Biome selection screen kicks us back to main menu
• MC-183018 – When sneaking while flying underwater in Creative, the player exits flying mode after a few seconds
• MC-183402 – Tutorial doesn’t advance when breaking nether tree
• MC-183554 – Ruined portals generated in lava lakes unnaturally displace lava, resulting in weird borders
• MC-183588 – Stray emerald block in structure bastion/treasure/big_air_full
• MC-183594 – The 5th large inner and outer hoglin stables do not generate in bastions
• MC-183599 – Some hoglin stable stair structures do not generate
• MC-183762 – Description of F3+N in help menu still describes the old functionality
• MC-183809 – Large Oak Trees replace blocks
• MC-183880 – Distracting baby piglins with gold grants the ‘Oh Shiny’ advancement
• MC-183915 – Wall Heads & Skulls are slightly offset from block selection outline
• MC-183931 – nether fortress mobs no longer spawn in extended bounding box
• MC-183933 – show_text tellraw hover events don’t work for components that need resolving (nbt, score, selector)
• MC-184093 – Using an end gateway teleports the player half a block too high
• MC-184250 – Font of the enchantments displayed in the enchanting table is italic
• MC-184608 – “Unknown biome, defaulting to plains” error upon launching the game
• MC-184612 – Import Settings “s” isn’t capitalized
• MC-184613 – End Stone generates in Floating Islands setting
• MC-184644 – Cave buffet generator generates with netherrack, even if using a non-nether biome
• MC-184653 – [Crash] “java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: value already present:” – Game crashes when worldgen dimension type presets are not unique
• MC-184675 – Superflat void preset doesn’t have a starting platform again
• MC-184699 – ‘/spreadplayers under’ does not prevent invalid values
• MC-184723 – The “i” in “World Type: Floating islands” is not capitalized
• MC-184757 – [Crash] “java.lang.NullPointerException: Ticking memory connection” on loading a dimension with debug chunk generator
• MC-184887 – You can spawn in the bedrock ceiling of a Caves world
• MC-184900 – Newline in tellraw adds a space at the beginning of the new line
• MC-184984 – Game crashes after generating multiple worlds in succession
• MC-185004 – [Crash] java.lang.NullPointerException – Crash on entering end/nether portal when dimension is removed in worldgen settings
• MC-185164 – Bottom half of icebergs always generate at y=62 regardless of sea_level
• MC-185285 – Entering the End or the Nether after creating and reentering a debug world crashes the game
• MC-185299 – Villagers cannot be summoned with a specific type unless you also specify a profession
• MC-185363 – sync-chunk-writes often takes over a minute to close a world
• MC-185417 – Maps reset on upgrade
• MC-185616 – Turtle eggs can’t hatch on red sand
• MC-185949 – Copy “C” in Click to Copy to Clipboard isn’t capitalized
• MC-186078 – Transparent items render in front of transparent blocks on some graphics cards when graphics setting is set to fabulous
• MC-186084 – Piglin head and torso floats and detaches during celebration dance
• MC-186085 – Player is unable to interact with the world after dismounting a boat while it’s moving
• MC-186091 – When you stop swimming, “diving underwater” sound occurs and vision flashes
• MC-186092 – The head of a piglin becomes offset after performing their celebration dance
• MC-186097 – Pigs are moving very slowly
• MC-186248 – “m” in Safe Mode button isn’t capitalized
• MC-186263 – “b” & “l” in Create Backup & Load isn’t capitalized
• MC-186337 – The lighting of the “Client” doesn’t correspond to that of the “Server”
• MC-186353 – The “s” and “m” in “Edit sign message” are uncapitalized
• MC-186403 – Swimming up on the side of flowing water no longer prevents the player from drowning
• MC-186492 – Lily pad placement in creative mode causes item on hotbar to flicker/vanish
• MC-186905 – “Superflat Customization” screen resets every time you open it and does not show previously saved settings
• MC-187363 – Charged respawn anchors no longer light up blocks around them
• MC-187367 – Netherite recipes show up in crafting table despite requiring a smithing table to use
• MC-187371 – Game crashes when attempting to change cloud settings on some graphics cards
• MC-187392 – Items in waterlogged stairs don’t float up high enough to be caught by a water stream above the stair
• MC-187394 – Dying Ender dragons are rendered completely white when using Fabulous graphics
• MC-187402 – Lighting in the End dimension is much darker when on a server
• MC-187405 – /seed is no longer available without cheats enabled
• MC-187411 – Particles and clouds not rendering properly behind stained glass and solid blocks
• MC-187437 – Held item is invisible in inventory menu
• MC-187449 – Zombie Pigmen/Zombified Piglins do not drop XP and rare drops anymore if killed by anything other than the player while in angered state
• MC-187466 – Mobs killed in creative mode don’t drop experience
• MC-187468 – Enchantment glint does not render for certain things on “Fabulous” setting
• MC-187483 – The advancement “Two by Two” can be achieved by just breeding turtles
• MC-187504 – Mobs do not drop rare drop items when killed by a player in Creative Mode
• MC-187552 – Piglins and Hoglins shake in the nether on servers
• MC-187585 – Dolphins with NoAI:1b can drown
• MC-187592 – Piglins constantly picking up gold nuggets and dropping them
• MC-187611 – White squares when in first person with fabulous video settings and F1
• MC-187618 – Demo world not saving after saving and quitting then quiting out of minecraft
• MC-187673 – [Crash] “java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unregistered dimension type”
• MC-187676 – “d” in Reset to default isn’t capitalized
• MC-187677 – “b” in Go back isn’t capitalized
• MC-187679 – Bees stay angry far longer
• MC-187730 – Newly spawned Zombified Piglins do not pick up the aggro of older spawned aggravated Zombified Piglins
• MC-187739 – NeutralMob.playerDied(Player) does not return if forgiveDeadPlayers = false
• MC-187796 – Wolves only use their hostile appearance after being attacked
• MC-187811 – Ender dragon death animation suddenly flashes right after it has ended
• MC-187978 – /seed availiable to all players on multiplayer server
• MC-188070 – Glitched skin while swimming (left hand)
• MC-188088 – Overworld superflat preset no longer generates with terrain decorations
• MC-188216 – Superflat biome selection overrides block selection on “Create New World” screen
• MC-188393 – K in “4k” should be capitalized

As the next console generation revs up, Microsoft and Sony have both made bets on the fact that consumers are only interested in purchasing one of the company’s consoles for their household.

While this may especially prove true at launch, new data from Ampere Analysis suggests this isn’t the case in the long term. In a report just published, the Ampere states that 32.2 percent of PlayStation 4 owners also won an Xbox One, while 18.5 percent of PS4 owners own an Xbox One X.

The cross-ownership flows even stronger in the reverse direction. 47.5 percent of Xbox One households also own a PS4, and 27.4 percent of Xbox One Households have a PlayStation 4 Pro. That means almost half of Xbox One households are effectively two-console households.

Ampere’s data doesn’t make predictions about how this might the next console generation’s sales, and it obviously isn’t able to measure the incoming economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But for this generation of game console ownership to close out with so much overlap does increase a growing agnosticism toward a particular platform of choice, which may be a boon to game developers.

Managing personal finances can be a daunting prospect for most people, but having the right tools can help make it less challenging. While millions of people use Excel to track their budgets, manually updating a budget spreadsheet every month with the latest transactions can be a very time-consuming process. As organizing and tracking finances becomes a critical task for many of us, we want to help make managing your personal budget in Excel a more seamless experience. Today, with the launch of Money in Excel, we’re embarking on a journey to simplify your day-to-day money decisions to help you stay on track of your longer-term financial goals.

Money in Excel

Money in Excel is now available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in the U.S.

Download now

Manage your money—without ever leaving Excel

Money in Excel is a dynamic, smart template and add-in for Excel that allows you to securely connect your bank, credit card, investment, and loan accounts to Excel and automatically import your transaction and account information into an Excel spreadsheet.

If you’re a current Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber, simply go to this link to download the template. Once downloaded, open the Excel template¹ and follow the on-screen prompts to connect your financial accounts using a secure third-party plugin supported by Plaid² (Plaid currently supports most major U.S. financial institutions). Once your account information is verified, the workbook will be updated with your latest transaction history³ and is now ready for use.

Now, let’s look at how Money in Excel can help simplify the task of managing your finances.

Keep track of your money

Once your financial accounts³ are connected, Money in Excel will automatically import your transaction information from all your accounts into one workbook. You no longer need to spend hours manually setting up a personal finance spreadsheet from scratch; Money in Excel does it for you in just a few seconds. And every time you want to update the workbook with the latest transactions, just click the Update button and get the latest snapshot of your transactions and accounts without ever leaving Excel.

Get closer to your financial goals

Once your transaction information is imported into Excel, it’s easy to track your spending habits to help stay on course and get closer to your financial goals. Use the “Snapshot” sheet to get an instant glimpse of how you’re spending across various categories such as groceries, household items, rent, and more. With the help of easy-to-read graphs, you can quickly track how your spending compares month over month. And to help ensure you are not caught unaware of any unwelcome transactions, Money in Excel will alert you to increases in your subscription fees, changes in bank and overdraft charges, or any big purchases that were posted during the month.

Easily customizable to suit your needs

We know people often choose Excel to manage their finances because it allows them to take a more personalized approach. With this in mind, we designed Money in Excel to be easily customizable to suit your needs and goals. For example, if a certain transaction does not fall within an existing spending category, you can simply add your own. If you want to perform a quick custom analysis, you can copy the relevant transactions into a new Excel sheet and use any of your favorite Excel features to do quick calculations. And while Money in Excel already comes with charts that have been created based on your transaction information—such as one for your recurring expenses—you can always create your own charts and tables and add them to the workbook.

From helping you track your monthly spending to alerting you about subscription price increases, Money in Excel makes it easy to manage your money. We hope that by using Money in Excel, organizing your finances becomes a more manageable and empowering experience. We can’t wait for you to try it out and share your feedback with us.

¹For the best experience, we recommend using Money in Excel on a PC or Mac. Optimal performance when using Windows 10 and Edge/Chrome browsers.
²Plaid is a third-party company that provides permissioned connections to financial accounts, at the user’s direction, to power Money in Excel.
³After granting permission for Plaid to connect a financial account with Money in Excel, Plaid will access the account’s balances, transaction history, and associated account information, like owner name and address. Plaid will not have access to your Microsoft 365 subscription login information and will not share financial institution login credentials with Microsoft. Contact Plaid at privacy@plaid.com or by clicking the support button at https://my.plaid.com/help to learn about options for managing your data with Plaid.
⁴For any additional information regarding Money in Excel, visit our FAQ.

A large number of Pokémon GO players have been reporting serious issues with their in-game accounts, noting that they’ve received bans for cheating despite being completely innocent.

Eurogamer says that it has received “more than 100 messages” from concerned players in the last couple of days, noting that fans believe the total number of affected users are in the “thousands”, and threads on popular subreddits paint a pretty worrying story. It would appear that some iPhone users on the iOS 12 operating system are being wrongly impacted, with those affected receiving the app’s infamous seven-day soft ban warning.

Usually reserved for players caught cheating, this warning serves as a first ‘strike’ on your account and can limit the Pokémon you can find in-game. Repeat offences can cause a player to earn more strikes, eventually resulting in a permanent ban.

Developer Niantic has acknowledged the issue, sharing this message to social media today:

If you’ve been affected by this problem, we’d urge you to keep an eye on Niantic’s Twitter account above to be informed of any updates.