Top all-time · #3025
Axel Rietschin
Personal blog · isolveproblems.substack.comprogrammingbusiness
Axel Rietschin writes Axel’s Substack, a personal blog at isolveproblems.substack.com about programming and business. Since 2026, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its multi-part series by a former Azure Core engineer on engineering problems at Microsoft Azure. Commenters cite it when discussing GitHub outages and Azure reliability.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
My personal Substack.
Most-linked posts?
- Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer21 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2026-04-02
- Horror Stories from Former Azure Engineer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-03
What Hacker News says?
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Northflank Breached”Submitted Horror Stories from Former Azure Engineer as a story · 3 points
HN discussionReally not surprising given the history of sloppy coding, elementary authentication mistakes, outsourced "support", and anecdotal reports of horrid internal culture over the past few years [2026] Erosion of Trust @ Azure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... [2026] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/05/18/sto... [2025] https://ww…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Azure's Weakest Link – Five Full Cross-Tenant Compromises”Submitted Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars, Pt. 3 as a story · 1 points
HN discussioncompetent, wishing to be competent, and not having your leadership suffer a psychotic break with reality: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?”Submitted The AI Compute Race: Microsoft's Miss and Oracle's Opportunity (2025) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFun read about Azure and having 173 agents running a node: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... Probably just a coincidence that Github started to have issues after beginning their move to Azure at the end of last year.
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Disruption with Some GitHub Services – Resolved”Submitted Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCoupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github's abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”Here you go: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks”It's Microsoft's touch. Anything they touch gets fucked up. It's because of their shitty infrastructure aka Azure. There was an employee here who actually gave insight into how bad the situation was a while back. Just reading that should make you re-evaluate anything owned by Microsoft. Edit: here's the link: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Degraded availability for GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages and Webhooks”100% if this post ( https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ) is anything to go by, it could explain much of the scaling & reliability issues.Perhaps github not being built to scale this fast + being hosted on azure is closer to the truth.
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?”May I just leave this for you here? https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... A technical foundation is not infinitely strong. Put a big enough castle on a swamp, and it will sink into the swamp.
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?”Azure is worse. These series of posts were posted here not that long ago https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “An Update on GitHub Availability”perhaps https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ?
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “An Update on GitHub Availability”This one? https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “An Update on GitHub Availability”Let's be honest here, the real reason is the crap that is Azure. GitHub was perfectly fine until then. They are just too bureaucratic to admit it. Worth reading: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”Similarly, I've often wondered if this is the root cause of why GitHub has become fragile of late. All of a sudden you have operations on billions of tiny files that are amplified by AI usage. And object graphs are so fragmented by nature that it's hard to e.g. prefetch a page into memory and ensure that common git operations mainly touch that page's set of objects. And if https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-m…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches”Nobody is winning any UX prize there. Azure, AWS, GCP... they are all terrible. Back then GCP for instance used to only work reliably on chromo-based browsers. Azure has that horrible overlay UI that abuses extended real estate that just doesn't work. But azure wins most prizes for being terrible becuase, among other things, https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... . It's not the worst provide…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “The next phase of the Microsoft OpenAI partnership – OpenAI”Everything. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “OpenAI models coming to Amazon Bedrock: Interview with OpenAI and AWS CEOs”i might be connecting unrelated dots, yet when i read "migration to Azure" this came back to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'”Azure’s core hypervisor orchestrator was half-baked at launch and it has never been fixed. This long read blog series explains a lot for me — for example, why the FedRamp certification program was never able to get a straight answer from Azure about how they handled secrets. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://www.kunalganglani.com/blog/microsoft-fedramp-failure...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “GitHub Is Down”The article you are thinking of was likely written by Axel Rietschin who worked on Azure core compute team. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Show HN: Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions”Nope. It's entirely azure management fault. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “GitHub Is Down”https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?”Even if you don’t view the US as a strategic risk, it is wise to have a plan to not be in Microsoft’s ecosystem. Microsoft has all but abandoned their self hosted products in favour of cloud, and their cloud services are a security risk. Microsoft’s cloud was described as a “pile of shit” but it achieved FedRAMP ATO only because so many agencies were already using their services. https://www.propublica.org/article/m…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “France's government is ditching Windows for Linux, says US tech a strategic risk”>Why do you think Windows is currently such a mess? There have been some writings and posts here about Microsoft. Here is one from last spring, from a guy that was long time Windows core developer and moved to Azure group. It's well worth reading, what he writes about challenges they have had and most likely still have if not even worse now. https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... and the rel…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “How do functions like alloca allocate memory from the stack?”Not sure "good product" and "Azure" really belong in the same sentence. Have you read this? https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
on “VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage”I think this is especially problematic (from Part 4 at https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... ): "The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something." Once you reach this stage, the only escape is to firs…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-2f5
on “Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer”At no point during the reading I got sense that he's suggesting something radical. Where specifically is he pointing out rewrite? "The practical strategy I suggested was incremental improvement... This strategy goes a long way toward modernizing a running system with minimal disruption and offers gradual, consistent improvements. It uses small, reliable components that can be easily tested separately and solidified…
Comment linking /p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion-841
on “Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer”
