Why would any company as big as Microsoft choose to centralize software services so much that if something goes wrong, it effects everyone around the world?

If everyone uses Microsoft and it goes down for Microsoft, nobody blames you, and you're at no disadvantage compared to them.

Much of the productivity gain from this AI boom came from shuffling off the expensive emphasis on robustness and reliability, and this downtime is just one of the externalities of this increase in developer productivity.

As evidenced by Crowdstrike stock quadrupling since it took down half the internet in 2024, vanishingly few people actually care about downtime like this.

Meanwhile, there is decades-long familiarity with Microsoft's product offerings which makes for generational vendor lock in.

I think this is just a new normal. Genuinely speaking, what percentage of businesses will de-Microsoft in the next year over this? I don't think it would even be 2%.

If it goes wrong its bad for users.

As long as it works its good for them.

Because not centralizing it means you now have countless separate environments that you need to manage, and if you manage them centrally, congrats, you reintroduced a SPOF again.

You can reduce the blast radius of outages at the cost of increasing the frequency a lot.