I think it was because most people are used to Teams being an application with a poor experience, so a widespread degradation in service just looks like what people normally expect from Teams.
I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.
This was my experience. Teams was slow and functioning badly this morning, but it wasn't until someone else said they were also not seeing images that I realized it wasn't just typical jank. Teams is just not good to use in the first place so it doesn't occur to me to think I should check for outages whenever I have a problem.
I think especially with how Teams responded to this problem. It wasn't saying it couldn't connect or anything.
I had a few symptoms:
First teams froze my entire computer when I started it when it couldn't connect.
Then it finally loaded and a message I sent would appear in the preview on the left but not actually in the chat window (the preview where it shows the name list of chats I have).
Then messages would just sit with that circle sending, but I would receive messages occasionally.
A simple "can't connect" would have gone a long way.
Today was the first day, in the ~4 months that we've been using Teams and MS365 for our company, that anyone noticed an actual outage. I got an email about it from a colleague and they weren't aware of the outage (I wouldn't expect them to, this team is very non-technical). So I get to explain these types of things next week, that we can't really "fix" these issues, they will happen though.
But yea, Teams is janky. I wish I could say it was the worst thing I experienced at work, but, alas, that remains a wish and a dream.
I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.