I also think Herb Sutter leaving his role at Microsoft might have been related with this.
From "Microsoft Azure security evolution: Embrace secure multitenancy, Confidential Compute, and Rust"
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-secur...
"Decades of vulnerabilities have proven how difficult it is to prevent memory-corrupting bugs when using C/C++. While garbage-collected languages like C# or Java have proven more resilient to these issues, there are scenarios where they cannot be used. For such cases, we’re betting on Rust as the alternative to C/C++. Rust is a modern language designed to compete with the performance C/C++, but with memory safety and thread safety guarantees built into the language. While we are not able to rewrite everything in Rust overnight, we’ve already adopted Rust in some of the most critical components of Azure’s infrastructure. We expect our adoption of Rust to expand substantially over time."
From "Windows security and resiliency: Protecting your business"
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...
"And, in alignment with the Secure Future Initiative, we are adopting safer programming languages, gradually moving functionality from C++ implementation to Rust."
Finally,
"Microsoft is Getting Rusty: A Review of Successes and Challenges - Mark Russinovich"