OneDrive abusers cause drastic changes to cloud storage service

In a new post over on the OneDrive blog, Microsoft has revealed that a small number of users have been abusing the cloud storage service since the Redmond company began rolling out unlimited storage for Office 365 subscribers late last year.

Some of this abuse resulted in these users storing in excess of 75 TB, yes terabytes, of data in their accounts that included complete music, DVD, DVR recordings and backups for multiple PCs.

According to Microsoft, this small number of users were taking up over 14,000 times the average storage that was used by others users on the service. If you do the math that means the average user on OneDrive is storing approximately 5.4 GB of files on the service.

It was just over a year ago when Microsoft's Julia White, who at the time was the Office 365 General Manager, announced that all Office 365 subscribers would ultimately get unlimited storage at no additional cost.

Of course, an offer like this was very well received and they began the roll out immediately however, sometime earlier this year the process of upgrading Office 365 Home, Personal and University accounts ground to a halt without any explanation.

As of tonight it appears that with this update from the OneDrive team, we know exactly why those upgrades to unlimited storage stopped being applied to accounts on the cloud storage service.

The unlimited storage for Office 365 customers is not the only area that is going to change either.

According to the the OneDrive team the following storage options will be modified:

Microsoft states they want to make this transition as easy as possible for customers and will implement it as follows:

In all of these situations if your storage allowance is lowered you should not lose access to your files on the service however, you will be unable to store any new data on OneDrive until you remove enough files to drop below your new storage allowance. This is how OneDrive has always worked in the past and handled overages in a storage account.

Responsible users of OneDrive are going to be upset at this news and rightly so. A promise was made to deliver unlimited storage if those users subscribed to Microsoft Office 365 offering and that is now being pulled out from under those same loyal customers. The offers of pro-rated refunds are fine but this is more than just offering refunds.

It is never a good thing to punish the majority of users for the actions of a few inconsiderate ones and the backlash from this unexpected announcement is going to put a dent in any good will Microsoft has recently been earning with its dedicated customers.

What do you think about these sudden storage changes?

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