Microsoft on Friday morning fixed its previous day glitch affecting its MSN, Windows Live and Hotmail services. The “temporary outage” caused widespread panic among users when their sign up was invalidated with their inboxes disappearing, and instructions for signing up a new e-mail account!  

Late Thursday night, Microsoft assured the users that their inboxes as well as e-mails were “safe,” and that the quandary resulted from an “incorrect message,” which apparently had been sent out during the company’s “routine maintenance” procedure.

Good news for the gamers in India! The maker of Xbox gaming console, Microsoft has released its Xbox 360 Arcade in India. The entry-level console - Xbox 360 Arcade has been launched to replace the Xbox 360 Core model in India.

The Xbox 360 Arcade offers everything for gamers' contentment. It comes with a pack of five classic arcade games, including Uno, Luxor 2, Boom Boom Rocket, Pac-man Championship Edition, and Feeding Frenzy.

Bonn, Germany  - German's main competition agency, the Federal Cartel Office, fined US software company Microsoft 9 million euros (12 million dollars) Wednesday for imposing a retail price for its Office Home & Student 2007 software.

Microsoft said it would pay the fine to avoid a lengthy legal dispute and was reviewing its internal processes in Germany to ensure they complied with German law in future.

San Francisco - Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it was terminating its Encarta online encyclopedia, as the world's largest software company found it too difficult to compete with the challenge of its collaborative competitor Wikipedia.

Microsoft said it would discontinue all editions of Encarta on October 31, 2009 except for Encarta Japan, which would be discontinued on December 31, 2009.

Encarta was launched in 1993 as a pet project of Microsoft chairman and founder Bill Gates who saw the project as a great way to showcase the power of computers.

San Francisco  - Despite some initial glowing reviews, Microsoft has been flooded with complaints about its new Internet Explorer 8 and has seen early users downgrade to the previous version, Information Week reported Monday.

The software giant is hoping that its new browser will help stem a steady flight of surfers to rival products, most notably the open- source Firefox browser.

According to the latest figures, Firefox now controls 22 per cent of the browser market compared to 67 per cent for Internet Explorer, which once enjoyed more than 90 per cent of the market.

Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani and NRI steel baron Lakshmi Mittal figured at top position among 24 richest Indians in the recently announced list of Indian billionaires by the prestigious Forbes' magazine. Both also emerged as biggest loser under the impact of global slowdown and recessionary waves in the world. Mukesh's brother and industrialist Anil Ambani managed to get third slot in the list with a total wealth of USD 10.1 billion.