Dumb article but note the phrasing from the HR person:
“In certain countries there was huge lockdown, and so we would have our own employees choose to sleep in the data center because they were worried they’d get stuck at a roadblock, trying to go home.”
I could totally see this happening as a real concern (better to be in a building than stuck in traffic at night) if there was actually issues with blockage in roads but 1. I don't trust Microsoft's claims at all and 2. I don't recall there being massive problems with the roads? If anything I remember the opposite that they were mostly empty cause travel was down.
Issues I heard of were more some areas having police stopping people or turning them around if they weren't supposed to be out, keeping essential only employees out and keeping it to/from office transit. Only heard of a handful of instances of this in the US and it was mostly around the beginning of the pandemic in NY/NJ, but it might've happened globally more.
For MS management they may have decided that the potential for added downtime from these interactions would've been too much given their uptime requirements in a lot of their contracts, and forced some of these workers to sleep at their data centers as a result to "fix" the issue.