Microsoft is Throttling Some 365 Services Due to High Demand

YouTube isn’t the only service that is trying to cut their use of Internet bandwidth to maintain their service levels. Microsoft Office 365 is being throttled as well. I expect that the strain of so many people working from home, and trying to keep up with the news is causing many services to adjust to the increased usage.

Slashdot – “Microsoft Throttles Some Office 365 Services To Continue To Meet Demand

In response to high demand as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft has started taking action to preserve overall performance by throttling some services. ZDNet reports:

On March 16, Microsoft posted to Microsoft 365/Office 365 admin dashboards a warning about ‘temporary feature adjustments’ that it might take. That warning told customers that Microsoft was ‘making temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities.’ Officials said they did not expect these changes to have significant impact on users’ experiences. Among the examples of the types of changes Microsoft might take would be things like how often its services check for presence; intervals in which other parties typing are displayed; and video resolution. Today, March 24, Microsoft started cautioning Microsoft 365/Office 365 commercial users of some other ‘temporary changes’ they should expect. The list:

OneNote:
– OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
– Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
– You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates at http://aka.ms/notesupdates.

SharePoint:
– We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
– Reduced video resolution for playback videos

Stream:
– People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.”