Microsoft implements restrictions on Azure services after increased usage – update

Microsoft reports that it is seeing a 775 percent increase in usage of its Azure services in some areas of mitigation against the spread of the coronavirus. The company imposes some restrictions to limit the tax.

Microsoft introduces certain limits on free offerings of Azure services and limits the resources of new subscriptions. The company does this to guarantee capacity for existing customers. According to the company, these are soft quotas: customers can submit requests to increase the limits. Microsoft reports a significant increase in use in Europe, among others. Despite this, the company says there has been no major disruption to services, although the company admits that the successful rollout of some types of compute resources is below its own mark of 99.99 percent.

With that, the company is responding to messages from Azure users last week that they were unable to start their virtual machines. The Register, among others, wrote about the complaints that users place about this on social media. According to Microsoft, most deployments are successful and the company considers shortcomings in compute resource allocation as service incidents for which it provides targeted support.

In addition to a 775 percent increase in usage of its Azure services in areas with measures such as social abstinence, Microsoft has seen the use of Teams grow to 44 million daily users. The use of Windows Virtual Desktop would have tripled.

Update, Tuesday March 31, 11.20: Microsoft clarifies that the 775 percent growth is in the number of monthly users of Microsoft Teams in Italy.