Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

A former Azure Core engineer's brutal chronicle of decisions that eroded trust in Microsoft's cloud became Hacker News's top story, amassing 1016 points and 473 comments. It names Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac's flaws indirectly by contrasting Azure’s closed-source debugging culture against Apfel’s transparent local architecture. Readers recoiled at revelations that engineering teams were pressured to hide outages—a practice 3x more common at Microsoft than at AWS, according to internal metrics. This referendum on Big Tech accountability exposed systemic failures that even 12 years of investment couldn't fix.