Microsofts restricts Azure and 365 as use spikes up to 775 percent

Microsoft announced several restrictions of its Azure and 365 services to curb bandwidth and computing power use. With millions suddenly having to work remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft is seeing a 775 percent increase of its cloud services in regions that have enforced social distancing or shelter in place orders.

Windows Virtual Desktop usage has more than tripled and Microsoft Teams now has 44 million daily users, which generated over 900 million meeting and calling minutes on Teams daily in a single week.

The software giant details the changes it made on its Azure blog.

We’re implementing a few temporary restrictions designed to balance the best possible experience for all of our customers. We have placed limits on free offers to prioritize capacity for existing customers. We also have limits on certain resources for new subscriptions. These are ‘soft’ quota limits, and customers can raise support requests to increase these limits. If requests cannot be met immediately, we recommend customers use alternative regions (of our 54 live regions) that may have less demand surge. To manage surges in demand, we will expedite the creation of new capacity in the appropriate region.

On the Practical 365 blog, we learn about various temporary feature adjustments to reduce the load on Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services. Among other things, this includes a reduction in download size and sync frequency for OneNote, and lower video resolutions for SharePoint and Stream.

The software giant promises it's expediting the addition of significant new capacity to ensure its cloud services can keep up with the massive increase in demand.