yep, my wife has the same problem at work

How many Microsoft employees are working on this? It's concerning that one of the biggest, most valuable companies on the planet, that runs services internationally, can have one of its primary services have gone down for this long.

6 hours ago they seemed to not exactly understand what the problem was, and that was 6 hours into the outage.

This is concerning.

Why would anyone introduce a single point of failure out of their control into their company?

We're doing anything to avoid single points of failure in our products, but our IT is doing the opposite.