November 13 2015: Microsoft has slashed the free cloud storage it offered its email users at OneDrive to a third from15 GB to 5 GB and has also reduced the storage it gave with paid subscriptions to Office 365 from unlimited to 1 TB.
It has implemented these changes because a small number of Office 365 consumers apparently took the 'unlimited' offer a little too literally and used up 75 TB or more.
Microsoft has chosen to punish all users of One Drive including millions of users who were encouraged to sign up for Microsoft Live services like Outlook or Hotmail by the offer of 15 GB free storage plus another 15 GB for camera uploads.
And they have made the change through a post on the One Drive blog that only a tiny fraction of users see. What's more the curtailment of service is cloaked in classic PR-language: "OneDrive storage plans change in pursuit of productivity and collaboration.
User reactions that can be seen below the post are angry or sad:
- Why punish everyday subscribers for those that are abusing your system with possibly illegal content.
- Taking away storage from what was promised after users have already utilized that storage is borderline criminal in my mind.
- Goobye onedrive!!!hello gdrive!!!'
Google offers 30 GB across Gmail and Google Drive or 15 GB in each. Yahoo recently offered 1TB of free storage to its email subscribers.
One Drive Outlook/hotmail
Google Drive Gmail