I'm guessing he inherited it. I'm guessing most people on this thread are in that boat.
Not sure how many outages are there on AWS.
I've run most everything in us-west-2 Oregon the last 5+ years and I can't remember a similar sort of outage there in that time-frame.
A widespread world-wide outage like is happening now on Azure is a red flag imo.
Yuck. Please tell me you don't do that anymore (unless for specialized workloads where you don't care if an instance loses data due to a shutdown).
One that does come to mind is the S3 outage a few years ago, which was essentially a global outage.
Everyone has down time, it's just often coordinated to a lot of people when it does happen. It's still generally less than when you try to self host on a cloud provider, it's just not your mistake that did it.
I'm not sure what the SLA is on a single region, but going down 0-2 times per year is a reasonable expectation, depending on the length of each one. If you want more, you have to have regional failover.
Azure is burning error budget in every region today and you would need to failover to a different cloud provider or your own datacenter.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, there was no plan you could implement solely in Azure that could have helped you today.
Worldwide outage? That's really not the case. Over thousands of machines in 3 years I haven't seen a single failure that spanned more than one region. Or even a region going entirely offline. At most you'll see one service affected.