Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.

If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.

I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.

Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.

How could you implement something like this by accident?

That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.

It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.

If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.

Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.

M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big

Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.

But it really seems like an own goal if true.

MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.