🤠 Meta Cuts 8K, Patch Tuesday Nukes Your DCs, and Anthropic Hits A Trillion

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Weekly IT Roundup 🤠

Meta dumped 8,000 jobs, Patch Tuesday cratered domain controllers across the planet, and Anthropic quietly passed a trillion-dollar valuation. Ship it.

GM IT pros!

Happy Friday! Made it. Tuesday's Vercel briefing was intense, but the universe decided to make sure the rest of the week earned its keep too — Meta layoffs, a Patch Tuesday that nuked domain controllers, Anthropic passing a trillion, and ServiceNow having its worst day ever. Grab coffee. Here's the roundup.

-Stetson

Tech News TL;DR

This week's IT and tech news in 5-minutes-ish or less

🔒 CYBER-SECURITY NIGHTMARES

Because sleep is overrated anyway...

🇫🇷 France's government ID agency loses 19 million citizen records
France Titres (ANTS), the agency that manages national IDs, passports, and driver's licenses, confirmed a breach exposing 19 million records of PII. The government says investigations are underway. "We take your identity very seriously" hits different when there's nine figures of it on a leak site. Read more

🔴 SharePoint zero-day CVE-2026-32201 under active exploit
Microsoft's April Patch Tuesday dropped fixes for 167 flaws including two zero-days, but the one you need to care about is the SharePoint Server spoofing bug that attackers are already using to impersonate trusted content over the network. If you still run SharePoint on-prem, congratulations, your weekend is booked. Read more

💥 April update crashes Windows Server domain controllers
KB5082063 (April's Patch Tuesday) is causing LSASS crashes on boot for Windows Server 2016–2025 domain controllers in multi-domain forests using Privileged Access Management. Translation: your DCs brick on restart. Microsoft pushed out-of-band fixes (KB5091575 / KB5091157) on April 19 — apply those before you reboot anything important. Read more

🧰 ASP.NET Core CVE-2026-40372 — critical privilege escalation, out-of-band patch
CVSS 9.1, Microsoft shipped an OOB fix this week. If you have any .NET web apps in production, this is a do-it-today patch. Not a "file a ticket for next sprint" patch. Read more

☁️ CLOUD CHAOS

Where your data goes to party without you

💰 VMware's 20% late-renewal penalty starts biting
Broadcom's new rule: if your VMware renewal slips past the deadline, you pay an automatic 20% retroactive penalty. Combine that with the subscription-only shift and bundled-suite pricing, and industry trackers say 50–75% of VMware customers are actively evaluating alternatives. The exodus is no longer theoretical. Read more

🧠 Google rolls out new custom TPUs to cloud customers
Google's latest in-house AI chips are shipping to cloud customers, with Thinking Machines Lab inking a multi-billion-dollar expansion of its Google Cloud TPU usage. The "Nvidia has no competition" narrative is aging poorly in real time. Read more

🛠️ Azure ships fixes for March's Azure OpenAI outage
Microsoft is finally shipping the capacity-headroom safeguards and HTTP-4xx anomaly detection it promised after March's GPT-5.2 Azure OpenAI meltdown. Completion estimated this month, meaning if you had customers eating 429s and 400s in March, the fix lands — six-ish weeks after the incident. Read more

🏢 BUSINESS SHENANIGANS

Corporate chaos you need to know about

💼 Meta laying off 10% — 8,000 jobs, starting May 20
Zuckerberg is scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles and cutting 8,000 existing ones to free up budget for a 2026 expense base of $162–169 billion, mostly AI infrastructure and AI-talent comp. Nothing says "we believe in AI" like firing humans. Again. Read more

📉 ServiceNow craters 18% after earnings miss, software sector follows
ServiceNow had its worst day on record Thursday after a weak quarter, dragging Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, and IBM down with it on AI-displacement fears. ServiceNow also cited "the U.S.-Iran war" as a contributing factor, which is a phrase you do not want to see in an earnings call. Read more

📮 Microsoft offering voluntary buyouts
Same week as Meta's layoffs, Microsoft is quietly dangling voluntary buyout packages. Different flavor, same direction. If you're watching your team, keep your resume current and your LinkedIn comments vague. Read more

🧮 Q1 2026 tech layoff tally: 78,557
Nearly 80,000 tech workers laid off in Q1, with 76% of the cuts in the US and roughly half of the affected roles attributed to AI-driven "efficiency." Still-hunting? The community board is at jobs.thisisanitsupportgroup.com. Read more

🤖 AI TAKING OVER

Our future robot overlords are getting smarter

💎 Anthropic passes $1 trillion secondary valuation, overtakes OpenAI
Anthropic's secondary-market valuation quietly crossed $1T this week, putting it ahead of OpenAI for the first time. Remember when $100B was a crazy AI number? That was 18 months ago. Read more

⚡ Anthropic lines up 5 gigawatts of Amazon capacity for Claude
Fresh off the Broadcom/Google chip deal, Anthropic signed an Amazon agreement for up to 5 GW of training-and-inference capacity. Stack that next to the Google TPU plans starting in 2027 and Anthropic now has real power-plant-scale compute locked in across two hyperscalers. Read more

🤝 Google Cloud Next drops agent-builder tools to chase OpenAI and Anthropic
At Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week, Google unveiled tools for building and tracking enterprise AI agents — the exact "control plane" play we flagged in Tuesday's briefing. The pitch is "bring your own model, we'll govern it and plug it into your data." Read more

📰 OpenAI memo leaks: CRO calls Anthropic "elitist," Altman hits back on "fear-based marketing"
A leaked internal memo from OpenAI's chief revenue officer accuses Anthropic of overstating revenue and running an elitist culture; Altman publicly called Anthropic's messaging "fear-based marketing." The frontier-model race now has a gossip column. Popcorn. Read more

🔧 MISC TECH MADNESS

The weird stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else

🧮 New ransomware strain uses post-quantum encryption
A newly spotted ransomware family called Kyber is targeting Windows hosts and VMware ESXi with a variant that encrypts files using Kyber1024, the post-quantum KEM picked by NIST. Decryption-after-the-fact was already hard. It's about to get worse. Read more

🚫 GitHub Copilot pauses new sign-ups, cites capacity crunch
Microsoft grounded new Copilot account registrations this week as demand overran inference capacity. If your new hires can't get seats yet, that's why. Existing seats are unaffected. Read more

🐧 Still Windows-only? Shameless Plug Dept.
With Meta cutting 8,000 heads and "AI efficiency" quoted as the reason for half of Q1 layoffs, the IT skills that'll survive the next round are the ones AI doesn't do well yet — and deep Linux fluency is near the top of that list. Shell Samurai is the hands-on Linux practice tool I built to get you from "I can cd" to "I can actually drive a server." No VM, no cloud credit card — browser only. shellsamurai.com. Shameless plug, zero regrets.

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That's the roundup for this week. Apply the OOB Windows Server patches before you reboot anything, watch the VMware renewal dates like a hawk, and maybe don't run SharePoint on-prem anymore if you can help it.

Stay paranoid. Stay patched. See you next Friday 🤠

-Stetson