How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars, According to a Former Azure Core Engineer

A former Azure core engineer, Axel Rechin, published a blog alleging internal engineering and organizational problems at Microsoft Azure.

He reported that an Overlake project planned to port 173 agents onto small Linux-based accelerators unsuitable for the Windows-based management software.

Rechin said teams saw millions of monthly crashes, test coverage under 40%, and that his offers to lead a rebuild went unanswered.

Microsoft had invested in OpenAI since 2019 but OpenAI announced other provider contracts in 2025 and Microsoft relinquished priority negotiation rights later that year, while Microsoft’s market value fell from about $4 trillion to around $2.8 trillion by April 2026.