Like, sure, microsoft.com/visualstudio looks too obvious. What about aka.ms/vs, ha ha ! Good luck guessing what this is about. Phishing ? I can’t say… click on it to be sure.
(I suppose is some Twitter madness that has gone out of control).
I don't know the official meaning - but I'm fairly sure it's for the abbreviation "Also Known As" - "AKA".
Beyond the obvious shortening feature, the main benefit is that MS can change the underlying resource the shortcut links to should they need to in the future.
For me it’s a disguised company-wide router used because nobody at Microsoft is responsible for URL schemes on official domains so nobody is confident that it’ll not break.
I don’t even think it’s a bad strategy tbf. But the domain is so awful and just looks like phishing if you don’t know MS is behind.