Not to defend Microsoft, but the thick-client Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) worked fine during the outage. Nobody couldn't use Excel because of this outage. Outlook worked fine too if you were connecting it to an on-premises Exchange instance.

This was an outage of a server-hosted database for email, not an outage of desktop application software.

Sure. Just wait till it gets fully entshittified. With thin clients you can enjoy any MSFT fuckup as free time off!