In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine.

Really burying the lead there. They were shut off due to government sanctions, not arbitrarily by Microsoft.

If software is a service, then service can be denied at any time. Host your own infrastructure, and reclaim digital ownership.

That goes for large businesses and individuals.

The new model is SAAH (Software As A Hostage). You would think that overpaid CTOs and CEOS would be able to anticipate something as obvious as this. "The Cloud" just means "someone else's server".

Control is never just outsourced; it's also abdicated through that outsourcing.

One extreme defensive move for an enterprise would be to implement full redundancy for anything not hosted on-premises. Redundancy for data protection is relatively straightforward, but having multiple email, supply chain, or e-commerce services is very expensive and disruptive. What are the odds that it would even be needed? Whatever those odds were, they just became much higher.

This is simply dumb. The odds are greater than zero. you must have a disaster plan. It sucks that MS did this but I don’t have much sympathy for anyone that decided to save money by ignoring DR.

Now they're going on a slippery slope. Just what EU needed to convince them entirely.

Critical Dependency As A Service

For when you need to outsource the potential crippling of your business to potentially hostile third parties.

Similar to Microsoft cutting off access to the email server at the International Criminal Court. We need to get our shit together.

Idk I wonder how abrupt this actually was. Russia sanctions have been happening for a while.

I swear to god I keep wondering when people are going to wake up to the fact that Cloud is such a fucking rip off on every level.

You'd think russian assets would work harder not to be dependent on US clouds.

People keep forgetting that "the cloud" is just someone else's computer. You don't want to pay for in-house experts to support your IT infrastructure? Welp, being locked out by a vendor is a side effect of that.

What's wild to me is how much more frequent this sort of thing seems to be becoming. Cloud services make a lot of money, but this kind of stuff is gonna drive risk-averse companies (aka huge companies with lots of money) back to on-prem or other alternatives. It seems very short-sighted. If I was a cloud provider I'd want to make myself look as ruthlessly indifferent to the services I host as possible.

"In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine. But what if the requester was a government that just didn’t like what an enterprise said or did?" I find this quote hilarious, because that "what if" scenario sounds like exactly what happened.

Context is important:

In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine.

Microsoft is now, essentially, a bag of dicks.

Nayara Energy Limited is an entity established in India and operating an important refinery in Vadinar. That refinery is 49% owned by the Russian State oil company Rosneft, and is a major refiner of Russian crude oil. The energy sector, in particular the oil sector, is a sector providing substantial revenue to the Russian Government.

Therefore, Nayara Energy is involved in an economic sector providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine.

Microsoft doing the right thing here. If you don’t want to worry about consequences of sanctions don’t use services from companies subject to jurisdiction of countries that sanction you.