Drunk Van Halen fan called Microsoft support and demanded to speak to Gates
1 day ago JadePuffer crims hijacked Azure identities and used them to blow up cloud resources 1 day ago Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached 1 day ago Some support calls become memorable because of the technical problem. Others stick in the mind because the caller has apparently consumed an adult beverage or three before demanding to speak to the boss. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared one from the latter category.His tale comes from a now-retired colleague who once staffed Microsoft's FrontPage support line.
- ▪1 day ago JadePuffer crims hijacked Azure identities and used them to blow up cloud resources 1 day ago Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached 1 day ago Some support calls become memorable because of the technical problem
- ▪Others stick in the mind because the caller has apparently consumed an adult beverage or three before demanding to speak to the boss.
- ▪Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared one from the latter category.His tale comes from a now-retired colleague who once staffed Microsoft's FrontPage support line.
The Register publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 779 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/30/drunk-van-halen-fan-called-microsoft-support-and-demanded-to-speak-to-gates/5300002 |
| Publication time | Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:29:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-30T11:32:01.607Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-30T11:32:01.607Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zcXNHaFc2EZ7 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); offbeat Drunk Van Halen fan called Microsoft support and demanded to speak to Gates A broken Java applet had one FrontPage user ready for an Eruption Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published wed 30 Sep 2026 // 12:29 UTC READ MORE Microsoft sends PDFs to strange new worlds instead of SharePoint 18 hours ago Redmond to millions of Power BI users: You’re Fabric app devs now 1 day ago What eldritch horror lurks behind Heathrow's information screens? 1 day ago…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Register
