There is no way intentionally increasing failure rates improves user retention... right? Please tell me it doesn't.

This is the problem building "it does everything" machines.

If you are pitching that your service can do potentially "whatever the client wants" you have such a thin basis on which to provide contracts and guarantees as a provider. The narrower the function, the clearer you can be about what's supposed to happen and why things might have gone wrong.

When you're using probabilities as the fundamental approach to computation, all of that goes out the window. Nondeterminism is powerful because it's insanely flexible, but the cost of that flexibility is predictability and expectation. Determinism was humanity's primary choice for formalisms and technology precisely because it reduces complex problems and situations to repeatable mechanics that are easy to understand. Deterministic tools can't do a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it is precisely these limitations that make them work well in concert and keep them comprehensible.

Another of the ways that software "engineering" is drifting even further away from traditional engineering. Failure mode analysis? Root cause analysis? I have no idea, I just talk to this magic box.

When a button breaks on a website, I have a model about what should have happened. Somewhere a contract got broken. [...] I might not have access to debug just an HTTP status 500, but I expect there to be somebody whose job is to understand why the endpoint is 500ing. The ownership is well-defined albeit opaque³.

For many users, however, the actual experience is roughly just "stupid thing sucks." Software already feels capricious; more failures just change the rate of frustration.

I am betting author does not use cloud services much. It is not just "users", it's developers as well. Github is returning 5xx? AWS service does not work? Your email did not get delivered? Nothing we (developers) can do, "stupid thing sucks".

Why is the author pretending that it is only now that inexplicable failures are being normalized? They've been normal ever since this industry has existed.

Literally go no further than the age old advice of "have you tried turning it off and then back on again?".

Did this person never experience the effects of rocking the boat just a little too much? Daring to do a little too good of a job? How?

The "normalization of inexplicability" is indeed infuriating. It has always been bad when it comes to computer software, and it's increasingly creeping into other consumer products that depend on embedded software.

I bought a new electric car recently. For the most part I've been quite happy with it. Shortly after I bought it, it started popping up a warning message saying "check EV system" every time I started it. By the time I brought it into the dealership, the warning had gone away, and the technician just told me something to the effect of "eh, I guess it just does that sometimes, let us know if it happens again." Hardware fault? Software bug? Who can say?

Like most modern cars, it has connectivity and Google Maps built into the infotainment system. The vast majority of the time, it works fine. Sometimes it says it has no connectivity (meaning no traffic data and suboptimal routes) for the duration of a drive, even in areas with a strong cell signal where it normally works fine. Sometimes the car says it has connectivity, but Google Maps still thinks it's offline. Sometimes Maps will actually load and display a route, but the "start navigation" button just spins forever as though it's still waiting for something. Are these related issues? Is there a common cause that might be fixable? Who can say?

(Conveniently enough, the warranty specifically does not cover any failures of software or firmware to operate correctly.)

It frustrates me quite a bit that the best solution to many issues is "Just try again tomorrow", trusting that the problem occurring on Azure is caused by some obscure backend service being down six timezones from our office, and the thing™ will start working again in a few days when Microsoft fixes said backend service.