I'm unable to create a VM: No VMs in dropdown or NotAvailableForSubscription error

Question

There are two scenarios that are being reported:

No VM images are available from the dropdown giving an "The value must not be empty" error.

Attempting to select B1s results in the NotAvailableForSubscription error.

Answer 1

You may notice that some VM sizes are unavailable for certain subscription types in your region as it experiences high demand. While we are working around the clock to increase capacity, you can create your VM resources in neighboring regions during these periods of high demand or create a support request to get expert guidance.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/general/region-access-request-process

Issue Type: Service and subscription Limit (quotas)
Quota type: Compute-VM (core-vCPUs) subscription limit increases

What is Microsoft doing to avoid capacity issues in the future?
Ensuring capacity for our customers is a top priority for Microsoft and we are working around the clock to deliver on this. The increasing demand for Azure services is evidence of the popularity of Azure, and emphasizes the need to scale up our infrastructure even more rapidly. With that in mind, we are expediting expansion and are improving our resource deployment process to respond to this strong customer demand. We have identified several improvements on how we load-balance under a high resource usage situation, and how to trigger the timely deployment of needed resources. Furthermore, we are increasing our capacity significantly – and will continue to plan for strong customer demand across all of our regions. This September 2021 blog post covers improvements towards delivering a resilient cloud supply chain.