Almost certainly due to Azure's broken policy where we have critical change advisory's that block deployments for huge periods of time towards the end of the year because of Black Friday and then holidays. Every team has basically been unable to deploy since the week before Thanksgiving when a surprise CCOA was pushed out by leadership at the behest of a certain big customer... then there was the World Cup and the winter holidays. Nobody could really deploy anything from a week before Thanksgiving until a week after the New Years... almost two months worth of batched changes and every team YOLO button pressing as soon as they could in January.
And now layoffs so everyone is super unmotivated! Excellent stuff going on right now from Microsoft senior leadership.
