University students in south China's Shenzhen City have dedicated long hours to building and testing combat robots, driven by competitive spirit and a determination to push the technology further.
The RoboMaster competition, held in the city each year, has been described as a "video game brought to life." With a tournament structure inspired by online battle arenas, the competition brings whole teams of combat bots to the battlefield.
The robots, operated in a hybrid of manual operation and autonomous programming, fire plastic projectiles at opponents, while an automated vision system tracks damage and health scores in real time.
Before the battle even starts, however, competing students put their robots through repeated rounds of testing and adjustment. For the standard "infantry" type, teams must prioritize mobility to complete on-field tasks and activate power-ups, while also perfecting automatic aiming systems to detect targets and predict their movements.
Together, these robots offered a glimpse into some of today's most advanced technologies, and the young engineers building them are already helping shape what comes next.
Lian Weisheng is the captain of the South China Agricultural University team and this was his first year leading the team.
"We've made it into the top eight," he said, adding, "I have full confidence in every unit our team operates."
Robotic battles drive college students to push technology forward in Shenzhen
Microsoft has apologized for a global service outage that left millions of users unable to use its apps, saying the cause was not a cyberattack.
The software giant said on Friday that it was deeply sorry for the global outage that affected millions of users. The company said the failure was not related to cyberattacks or AI agents, but was triggered by an earlier "network capacity upgrade," and that it cannot yet say when service will be fully restored.
On the same day, Microsoft described its recovery progress as "encouraging" and said it was working to deal with the aftermath of the outage.
The failure left Teams, Outlook and the AI software Copilot unavailable in at least 70 countries.
The company had also said earlier that some users could still run into intermittent access problems.
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) made a statement on Friday that the outage "inevitably" had a "disruptive impact" on its staff, but that appointments were going ahead as normal.
Around the world, some schools have asked parents to get in touch by phone. The U.S. federal government and court system have also reported related problems.
The outage began on Thursday, when multiple Microsoft 365 services failed on a wide scale, affecting government agencies, businesses and individual users in many countries. It is the second interruption of Microsoft 365 services this year.
The first disruption this year was on Jan 22, when Outlook, Teams and other services went down for several hours.
Microsoft apologizes for global outage, rules out cyberattack
