Just hours before it was scheduled to release its 4th Quarter Earnings, Microsoft abruptly cancelled its earnings call and released a public statement. “Due to unforeseen technical challenges, our earnings release is indefinitely delayed. We are working with the SEC on next steps.”
According to an insider, as CFO Amy Hood was doing her final review and putting finishing touches on the document, Microsoft Word crashed, and all the bulleted lists got screwed up. Our insider who wishes to remain anonymous was on a Teams call when this happened. He says Amy got “absolutely furious” and started screaming at her screen. “GODDAMMIT! These fucking bullets are all screwed up! Look, look! These ones over here indent nicely to a half inch, but these same ones a paragraph graph down don’t indent at all!! Look, I keep hitting Tab and NOTHING! NO INDENT!”.
Someone on the call recommended using Copilot to adjust the bullets, with disastrous consequences. After prompting it to “fix the damn bullets”, Copilot immediately deleted ten critical paragraphs, and then started rewriting the rest in a pirate’s voice.
Apparently after struggling for an hour with it, she gave up and threw her Surface Laptop 7 across the room. “Just cancel it.” she told her assistant. “We’ll deal with the consequences.”
The consequences could be big, in the form of large fines from the SEC.
After getting CEO Satya Nadella on the phone to explain the situation, she asked for Executive VP of Microsoft Office Ryan Roslansky’s severed head on the conference room table. When told that he was let go weeks ago, along with the whole Microsoft Office division, she barked “Fine! I’ll just do it in Notepad, the only Microsoft product that actually works.”