The post is so dramatized and clearly written by someone with a grudge such that it really detracts from any point that is trying to be made, if there is any.<p>From another former Az eng now elsewhere still working on big systems, the post gets way way more boring when you realize that things like "Principle Group Manager" is just an M2 and Principal in general is L6 (maybe even L5) Google equivalent. Similarly Sev2 is hardly notable for anyone actually working on the foundational infra. There are certainly problems in Azure, but it's huge and rough edges are to be expected. It mostly marches on. IMO maturity is realizing this and working within the system to improve it rather than trying to lay out all the dirty laundry to an Internet audience that will undoubtedly lap it up and happily cry Microslop.<p>Last thing, the final part 6 comes off as really childish, risks to national security and sending letters to the board, really? Azure is still chugging along apparently despite everything being mentioned. People come in all the time crying that everything is broken and needs to be scrapped and rewritten but it's hardly ever true.
What are we reading here? These are extraordinary statements. Also with apparent credibility. They sound reasonable. Is this a whistleblower or an ex employee with a grudge? The appearance is the first. Is it? They’ve put their name to some clear and worrying statements.<p>> <i>On January 7, 2025… I sent a more concise executive summary to the CEO. … When those communications produced no acknowledgment, I took the customary step of writing to the Board through the corporate secretary.</i><p>Why is that customary? I have not come across it, and though I have seen situations of some concern in the past, I previously had little experience with US corporate norms. What is normal here for such a level of concern?<p>More, why is this public not a court case for wrongful termination?<p>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience?
In my experience Azure is full of consistency issues and race conditions. It's enough of an issue that I was talking about new OpenAI models becoming available via Bedrock on AWS and how convenient that was since I wouldn't have to deal with Azure and my colleague in enterprise architecture went on an unprompted rant about these exact issues. It's not the first time something like this has happened and I've experienced these issues first hand, so yes. I'd say reliability is a critical issue for Azure and it hasn't gotten better each time I've gone back to check.
Yes it is that unreliable. Even when given free credits, I would rather pay for the offerings from Amazon/Google.
Azure is when you have a different version of the same product/api in each region.
The CEO is accountable to the board. If they are derelict in their obligations to the company, that's where you need to raise a stink so they can fix it.
He is, I think, Swiss, perhaps a cultural difference?
This reads pretty bad, and I believe it was. I worked on (and was at least partly responsible for) systems that do the same thing he described. It took constant force of will, fighting, escalation, etc to hold the line and maintain some basic level of stability and engineering practice.<p>And I've worked other places that had problems similar to the core problems described, not quite as severe, and not at the same scale, but bad enough to doom them (IMO) to a death loop they won't recover from.
I don't know if any of this is true, but as a user of Azure every day this would explain so much.<p>The Azure UI feels like a janky mess, barely being held together. I'm honestly shocked anything manages to stay working at all.
It's a nice read. Thank you for sharing this.<p>> Microsoft, meanwhile, conducted major layoffs—approximately 15,000 roles across waves in May and July 2025 —most likely to compensate for the immediate losses to CoreWeave ahead of the next earnings calls.<p>This is what people should know when seeing massive layoffs due to AI.
> The direct corollary is that any successful compromise of the host can give an attacker access to the complete memory of every VM running on that node. Keeping the host secure is therefore critical.<p>> In that context, hosting a web service that is directly reachable from any guest VM and running it on the secure host side created a significantly larger attack surface than I expected.<p>That is quite scary
"For fiscal 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earned total pay of $96.5 million, up 22% from a year earlier." -CNBC.com<p>and<p>"I also see I have 2 instances of Outlook, and neither of those are working." -Artemis II astronaut
I had the misfortune of having to use Azure back in 2018 and was appalled at the lack of quality, slowness. I was in GitHub forums, helping other customers suffering from lack of basic functionality, incredible prices with abysmal performance. This article explains a lot honestly.<p>Google’s Cloud feels like the best engineered one, though lack of proper human support is worrying there compared to AWS.
Title: <i>How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars</i>
What a fascinating view into how the sausage is made
This is an insanely blunt look into some serious issues with microsoft.
Any complex system - and these cloud systems must be immensely complex - accumulate cruft and bloat and bugs until the entire thing starts to look like an old hotel that hasn’t been renovated in 30 years.
What an epic takedown.<p>Microsoft should have promoted this guy instead of laying him off.<p>Did Microsoft really lose OpenAI as a customer?
A former Azure Core engineer’s 6-part account of the technical and leadership decisions that eroded trust in Azure.
What's your assessment of AWS and GCP? Do you think it's likely they suffer from some of the same issues (eg the manual access of what should be highly secure, private systems, the instability, the lack of security)?
I downvoted this comment for sounding like a summarizing LLM, not adding anything substantial beyond the title of the post, before realizing you were the poster and author.