🤠 Oracle Fires 30K, Chrome Zero-Day, and Your Excel Copilot is a Spy

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Weekly IT Roundup 🤠

Oracle Cuts 20K Jobs to Fund AI Dreams, Chrome Zero-Day in the Wild, and Your Excel Copilot Might Be Leaking Data

GM IT pros!

Happy Friday! Here's this week's IT 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...

🌐 Chrome Zero-Day Actively Exploited (CVE-2026-5281)
Google pushed emergency updates patching 21 vulnerabilities including a use-after-free bug in WebGPU that attackers are already exploiting in the wild. Update Chrome now, not after lunch. Read more

📊 Your Excel Copilot Is Silently Leaking Data
CVE-2026-26144 lets Microsoft Excel's Copilot Agent mode exfiltrate data without any user interaction. The AI assistant you trusted with your spreadsheets might be sharing them with someone else. Read more

📦 Axios Supply Chain Attack Hits NPM
The massively popular HTTP client got compromised — versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 shipped with a malicious "plain-crypto-js" dependency. If you haven't audited your node_modules lately, now's the time. Read more

🎣 Tycoon 2FA Phishing Ring Dismantled
Microsoft and Europol took down the Tycoon 2FA phishing-as-a-service platform that compromised nearly 100,000 organizations by bypassing MFA. The good guys scored one this week. Read more

📱 Android Critical RCE — No User Interaction Needed
March 2026 Android security bulletin includes a System component flaw allowing remote code execution with zero privileges required. Patch your fleet or explain to management why you didn't. Read more

☁️ CLOUD CHAOS

Where your data goes to party without you

🤝 AWS and Google Cloud Are Suddenly Best Friends
The two rivals launched a joint multicloud partnership enabling on-demand VPC connections in minutes. Microsoft Azure is expected to join later in 2026. Enemies to frenemies arc complete. Read more

🌍 AWS Drops $5.3B on Saudi Arabia Region
Plus a European Sovereign Cloud in Germany ($7.8B through 2040) and a Chile region ($4B). AWS is building data centers faster than you can provision EC2 instances. Read more

💸 Broadcom Still Making VMware Customers Miserable
New licensing changes, audit letters to former customers, and the channel program replaced with invite-only access. The great VMware exodus continues and nobody's surprised. Read more

📊 Big Three Cloud Providers Control 63% of Market
AWS at 30%, Azure at 21%, Google Cloud at 12% — growing 25% year-over-year. The rest of the industry is fighting over table scraps. Read more

🏢 BUSINESS SHENANIGANS

Corporate chaos you need to know about

🪓 Oracle Lays Off Up to 30,000 Employees
Freed capital is earmarked for AI data center investments to cover a $20 billion funding gap. Nothing says "we believe in AI" like firing humans. Read more

📉 Tech Layoffs Hit 85,000+ in Early 2026
208 layoff events so far this year. Amazon cut 16,000, Block went from 10,000 to 6,000. The "we're a family" emails must have gotten lost in the mail. Read more

💰 OpenAI Now Valued at $852 Billion
Generating $2 billion in monthly revenue with nearly 1 billion weekly active users. That's a lot of people asking ChatGPT to write their emails. Read more

🏗️ BlackRock Buys Aligned Data Centers for $40B
One of the largest private infrastructure deals in history. Turns out the real AI gold rush is selling shovels (and server racks). Read more

🔓 FBI Director's Personal Email Breached by Iranian Hackers
Published material from Director Kash Patel's personal email confirmed by the FBI. No government data exposed, but the optics are... not great. Read more

🤖 AI TAKING OVER

Our future robot overlords are getting smarter

⚖️ Judge Blocks Trump Admin's Anthropic AI Ban
A federal judge ruled the government violated free-speech protections by banning Anthropic's AI models in government systems. Claude lives to see another day in D.C. Read more

🏭 Enterprise AI Moves From Demo to Production
IT leaders are rapidly shifting from experimental to production-grade AI infrastructure with real-time edge computing. The gap between "cool demo" and "actually works" is shrinking fast. Read more

📹 OpenAI Kills Sora Video App
The expensive video generation tool is discontinued so OpenAI can refocus on enterprise integrations and an eventual IPO. Sometimes you gotta kill your darlings. Read more

🟢 Nvidia Backs Open-Source AI Challengers
Nvidia is funding startups like Reflection AI (eyeing $25B valuation) to build alternatives to proprietary models. When your biggest customer is also your competitor, hedge your bets. Read more

😟 Majority of Americans Think AI Will Cause Harm
Over half of U.S. adults believe AI is likely to cause harm, citing job displacement and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, the other half is using it to write their cover letters. Read more

🔧 MISC TECH MADNESS

The weird stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else

🪟 Windows 11 Emergency Patch Drops
Microsoft released an out-of-band update on March 31st to fix a critical installation failure affecting users worldwide. Because nothing says "trust us" like breaking your own installer. Read more

🐧 Linux 7.1 Gets Rust Graphics Driver Support
DRM Rust changes landing ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window in April. The Rust-ification of the kernel continues, one subsystem at a time. Read more

⚛️ Quantum Computing Goes "Made in America"
Qblox opened a manufacturing hub in Massachusetts and will ship US-made quantum control systems starting April 1st. Not an April Fools joke, surprisingly. Read more

🐚 Level Up Your Linux Skills This Weekend
If you're tired of Googling the same commands every time you touch a terminal, Shell Samurai teaches you Linux through hands-on practice. Built by yours truly. Shameless plug, zero regrets. Try it free

That's the roundup for this week. Patch your stuff, update your résumés (just kidding... mostly), and enjoy your weekend.

Stay paranoid. Stay patched. See you next Friday 🤠