Replying to myself, because the sibling comment is clearly at odds with what I'm saying, and I think that deserves to be addressed with more nuance than my first comment did.

I think there's a lot of variation in the quality of your interview experience when you interview at Microsoft based on how on top of things the recruiter is, how much the hiring manager prioritizes candidate experience, and headcount/budget complexities. Some teams don't have recruiters, so then the candidate experience is whatever the hiring manager makes time for.

I don't doubt the horror stories. For context, several years ago I applied for three different roles. I got rejected at the resume screen for one of them, rejected after the first phone interview for another, and I ended up taking an offer from the third. For both rejections, I got the news by email notification through Microsoft's careers app, not from the recruiter or from the hiring manager. I think it's a really impersonal way to find out after you've already done an interview round.

The specific point I was making is that, contrary to the parent comment but not the sibling comment, there is a standard way of doing things that ends with following up with the candidate. And, as a candidate, you do have explicit ways of figuring out what happened to your application, even if finding out you failed an interview via an app is kind of shitty. It's definitely not standard to ghost the candidate.

I waited a week and a half with no reply/response from anyone... It was the third email a few weeks after that finally got a dismissive response. This was around 2004 iirc, not sure if it's changed significantly since, or when your experience is related or where/what you were interviewing for.