Microsoft's Cyber Takedown and Visa Fight Take Center Stage as Stock Hovers Near Record

Microsoft has spent the past week fighting on two fronts that have little to do with its quarterly revenue line — one against criminal botnets, the other against Washington. The software giant secured a US court order yesterday, alongside the health-sector group Health-ISAC, to seize and redirect domains tied to services known as YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man. According to the company, that infrastructure carried more than one billion malicious messages aimed at over 75,000 organizations since January 2026. More than 20,000 linked user accounts were also shut down as part of the operation.

The legal strike came just a day before Microsoft's routine monthly security release, which patched several vulnerabilities — among them an actively exploited zero-day in the Windows Shell tracked as CVE-2026-96951. A week earlier, the company had rolled out fresh developer safeguards, making Microsoft Execution Containers generally available on Windows 11 so that file and network access policies can be set to isolate AI-agent workloads.

Brad Smith Pushes Back on H-1B Allegations

While engineers were closing holes in Windows, Microsoft president Brad Smith was pushing back on a different kind of attack. He dismissed as entirely unfounded accusations from US Vice President JD Vance that the company misuses the H-1B visa program, replacing American workers with foreign staff and paying them less. Microsoft counters that all employees are compensated under a single system regardless of origin, that it hired more than 9,000 US-born workers over the past year, and that new H-1B petitions accounted for just one percent of its total workforce in that period.

The political friction escalated on October 8, when the US Department of Labor suspended the so-called PERM process for Microsoft, Adobe and six IT service providers. That move blocks new applications for employment-based green card certifications and freezes pending cases for now. As of the end of June, Microsoft employed roughly 121,000 people in the United States — a workforce caught mid-stream in a heavy spending cycle on artificial intelligence and data centers. Smith warned in an interview that shutting out skilled immigration could hobble the entire sector for more than a generation and push top talent abroad, ultimately undermining US prosperity and competitiveness.

Analysts Split as Earnings Date Approaches

Investors, for their part, have largely shrugged off the regulatory noise. The stock changed hands at EUR 481.00 today, up 0.6 percent, keeping it within striking distance of its 52-week high of EUR 492.40 set just two days ago. Analyst opinion is less uniform: Barclays raised its price target to $600 earlier this week, while Phillip Securities moved the other way on Monday, downgrading the shares from Moderate Buy to Hold.

Attention now shifts to October 28, when Microsoft reports its next quarterly results. The key question for shareholders is whether Azure's cloud growth can sustain the pace of recent quarters.

Maia Chips and Data Centers Keep Rolling

Operationally, Microsoft continues to expand its own infrastructure. Its in-house Azure Maia 200 chip is already in production, and the successor, Maia 300, is slated for deployment at multi-gigawatt scale starting in 2027. The PERM suspension, meanwhile, has done nothing to slow that buildout — though it does complicate the company's ability to recruit the international specialists such projects typically require.