It was during the wave of "Moving costs from capex to opex give C levels more flexibility" movement after the initial 'cloud is better' wave. In retrospect it seems like another of their badly thought out reactions to a situation they caused by short term thinking, in this case the issues caused by trying to reduce headcount on teams supporting legacy and new physical locations while increasing the pace of new locations.

Those costs were moved and ended up higher than the capex costs were to begin with which everyone expected but the decision makers (they brushed it off every time they were asked in company Q&A's). Opex margins became a major issue and the company did performative layoffs and restructuring to appease the shareholders (then re-hired ~1/3 of the laid off staff within the next 8 months because they actually needed them)

The level of 'bad decision leading to bad decision' happening is somewhere between absurd and depressing at this point.