Microsoft is limiting the OneDrive space to Office 365 A1 users to 100GB per user and 100TB for entire tenants, and it might not be enough

Office 365 A1 license customers will be limited to 100GB of OneDrive space for personal profiles and 100TB of OneDrive space for entire tenants, with the change rolling out effectively over this month, according to Microsoft’s latest blog post.

Effective February 2024, users of Office 365 A1 license (free subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB for OneDrive strage, within the 100TB of pooled storage for the school tenant. IT Admins have the flexibility to set a lower limit for A1 users.

Microsoft

It is quite the downgrade considering, that OneDrive was (and still is, until the change is implemented effectively) providing Microsoft 365 A1 users with a space of 1TB, according to Microsoft, and now the Redmond-based tech giant cut down to 10% of that storage.

Microsoft says the change is necessary to increase the security of the platform.

Some of the benefits we expect to see include helping institutions reduce some of the security risks associated with legacy storage and data sprawl, a top concern for most chief risk officers, while also reducing our shared environmental footprint. 

Microsoft

However, some users are not happy with decision, and many of them complained that Microsoft hasn’t issued a clear warning that their OneDrive space will be reduces.

No notifications have been sent. I asked the support engineer and he was like “Um, not I believe there was no prior warning. I got a lot of tickets regarding this so I believe there was no prior notice”. WTF?! We got close to 1000 users (staff and students). I only got to know this because a user complained about her OneDrive showing a 100GB limit (instead of the usual 1TB). This is rolling out as we speak! I don’t believe this!

Reddit user

However, Microsoft made it clear last summer that these changes were going to be implemented, and we also reported it, back then.

But the new changes might not be suitable for large communities, such as faculties with thousands of students, as one Reddit user notes:

Let’s say you’re an organization that purchases 4,000 A3 for Faculty licenses. Let’s say you have 20,000 students. That would give you a 300TB pooled storage quota that is shared across Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. That means Microsoft is only giving an average of 12.5GB for everything they need to store in their Exchange mailbox and personal OneDrive, plus any usage they would put into Teams/SharePoint sites and shared Exchange mailboxes/resources.

Reddit user

It’s worth mentioning that the limiting will only be affecting the A1 license users, as A3 and A5 still have 1 TB of OneDrive storage. However, many users in the Reddit threads believe this could be the end for Microsoft cloud services, unless the Redmond-based tech giant comes with another solution.