Maybe they are doing this to push people into regions with lower energy costs. Of course Northern Virginia or Canada is going to give you much higher ping times.
I do honestly not think there is any bad intent behind it. I am just surprised that this is happening at all (esp. not with a resolution time of multiple months). They must have known for a long time that this would happen, so I would have expected an early heads-up!
Interesting thought. It would be crazy if turning down business was preferable to just raising prices to reflect increased energy costs. I'm not a cloud expert, but maybe they don't have the infra to price differently in some regions?
That’s the problem with charging average costs (assuming they do that) but the new user costs are at the margin which can be muuuuch higher.
Azure definitely has the ability to charge differently per region. They do it pretty frequently.
Why wouldn't they just price higher in those regions? People want/need regions for policy and compliance reasons, not just for ping, particularly with Europe and Germany I'd expect.