Hello @mdondon
can you tell what edition you are using and what version of Azure Devops you are on?
As for failing pipelines in case of wrong quality gate status, this is not how SonarQube interacts with Azure Devops usually (not that I am aware of). Even if the PR Quality Gate is failed, the pipeline is expected to succeed and the merge is forbidden through a branch policy as described with How to block the merge of Pull Requests when SonarQube Quality Gate is failed, with Azure DevOps
Let me know
Sylvain