The site is down because their provider is down. This is, as someone else stated, a fact. They told you that and that is really all they can do. They have to wait just the same as you do, for the same thing.
> This isn't Azure's fault.
Yes it is. The alternative is to pay more (a lot more) for projects to host all their own servers and storage and backups. That would be the end of a great many small to medium companies.
It would not be the "end of a great many small to medium companies" were they to use dedicated hosting. Hell, this is how it was commonly done up until the past 2 to 3 years, and small and medium companies thrived quite well.
In fact, after the cloud outages of the past week, and a few other recent outages, more traditional dedicated hosting keeps on looking better and better.
"Why didn’t we just fail over? We do have geo-replication for Windows Azure Blobs and Tables, where the data from US South is geo-replicated to keep another replica set of the data in US North. We have chosen at this time not to failover, since we believe we can bring back the primary storage stamp in US South in place. One of the advantages of recovering in place is it avoids losing the Windows Azure Queue data in that stamp, since Windows Azure Queues is not being geo-replicated at this time (we are working towards turning that on)."