Some exec at Microsoft told the Azure guys to ape everything Amazon does and they took it literally.

Or, the NSA needed to upgrade their access at both.

Do Microsoft still say "If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data, we don't participate in it" today (which PRISM proved very false), or are they at least acknowledging they're participating in whatever NSA has deployed today?

PRISM wasn't voluntary. Also there are 3 levels here:

1. Mandatory

2. "Voluntary"

3. Voluntary

And I suspect that very little of what the NSA does falls into category 3. As Sen Chuck Schumer put it "you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you"

“Voluntold”

I was gonna say that obv AWS hacked em to even things up.

This is funny but also possibly true because: business/MBA types see these outages as a way to prove how critical some services are, leading to investors deciding to load up on the vendor's stock.

I may or may not have been known to temporarily take a database down in the past to make a point to management about how unreliable some old software is.