Thanks @andresayej — this has been an interesting roller coaster week because, as you say, Microsoft Azure is a "big player" and I was certain there's no way they could screw something so simple up — it must be something I did. I would say this was a great learning experience that no, everyone can mess up.

I realize majority of people around here use AWS or Digital Ocean. I wound up on Azure because, as a self-taught dev, I was able to solve a problem about a year ago very quickly that I was not able to figure out on AWS — that being very large blob uploads (1gb or more) from the browser to a bucket. I was impressed with how easy this was to accomplish on Azure thanks to their documentation and example code that I decided to deploy my next project there (this one).

This is the first major hiccup I've encountered with Azure in over a year and I will say it has shaken my confidence a little bit, but since this literally just happened hopefully that confidence will be restored with reliable service from here on out. If not, then I will be on the lookout for another provider.

All in all, I'm just relived that this was not a mistake on my part. I thought I was losing my mind there for a week!