Timing really is everything - as Azure outage brings down the internet, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks up the success of the Microsoft cloud business

There's never going to be a good day for a Microsoft cloud outage to take down half the internet, but the timing yesterday couldn’t have been worse/better - delete as applicable - given that just that happened as the supplier was boasting about the success of its cloud business.

For fiscal Q1 2026, Microsoft turned in total revenues of $77.7 billion, beating Wall Street expectations. Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 26% year-on-year to $49.1 billion, powered by Azure business which which saw an impressive 40% growth rate while Intelligent Cloud revenue came in at $30.9 billion, a 28% rise The total value of cloud contracts that Microsoft has in the pipeline but not yet delivered on increased by 51% to $392 billion.

All of this growth comes with a large price tag attached as Microsoft struggles to match supply to demand, a problem facing so many other ...