An outage of several hours at Microsoft’s Azure cloud operation, which affected services such as its Teams workplace collaboration platform and Xbox Live, occurred just a few days after news of Microsoft’s $22 billion deal with the U.S. Army for 120,000 AR headsets, supplemented by Azure. Reports suggest that the cloud component is the biggest part of that deal, which does make me wonder (again) about World War III and the movies we will be watching in the future. I can picture it now! A group of highly trained US troops move across a battlefield in the dead of night

The enemy troops are not really there, of course, and the US troops are actually shooting each other because an intelligent and technologically-aware adversary has attacked the cloud service powering the troops AR headsets rather than bothering to go to the expense and inconvenience of training and deploying actual human beings (or even drones) to the theatre of conflict.