As a result of server shortages, Microsoft has reportedly stopped accepting new customers for some UK-based services, microsoft azure
According to The Telegraph, Microsoft’s two British regions, UK South and UK West, have stopped accepting new Cosmos DB and virtual machine customers.
Microsoft said in a message to managed services provider QuoStar, “Unfortunately, due to high demand in this region (UK South), we are not able to approve your request at this time.”
The message promised a “bi-monthly” update on the availability of services in the future.
The Telegraph attempts to blame the outage on the headline-grabbing Ukraine war, claiming that it is the result of the company agreeing to host “Ukraine’s entire government on its remote servers.”
This isn’t entirely correct. Following Russia’s unprovoked invasion, Ukraine moved data to its safer western edge before transferring much of it to an unknown private cloud service in Poland. It is also negotiating a similar agreement with France and Estonia.
Some Ukrainian government services have indeed moved to Microsoft Azure, with the company claiming to have assisted in the migration of 16 of the 17 government ministries to the cloud – with Microsoft president Brad Smith claiming that the load is distributed across Europe.
The size of the hosting was not disclosed, but Microsoft previously stated that its tech support to the Ukrainian government, which includes AI tools and cybersecurity, is valued at around $100 million. Over the last two years, Microsoft has spent more than $12 billion on European data centers.
While the addition of Ukrainian government and corporate workloads will put additional strain on Microsoft’s European data centers, the cloud provider is dealing with a broader supply issue.
According to The Information, Microsoft data centers around the world are running with limited server capacity available to customers due to a global server supply shortage.
More than two dozen data centers have limited server capacity available to customers, and server capacity at more than a half-dozen Azure data centers is expected to remain constrained until early next year.
The data center industry has been impacted by widespread supply shortages across the board, most notably in semiconductors. Chip shortages are expected to last for years, slowing server rollouts in data centers all over the world. Square Enix was one of them, unable to launch data centers due to server shortages, rendering the popular game Final Fantasy XIV inaccessible to many.
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“We have seen unprecedented growth in the cloud across the globe,” a Microsoft spokesperson told DCD. With this surge, as well as macro trends affecting the entire industry, we’ve taken steps to address customer capacity increases while also accelerating server deployment in our data centers.
“Our top priority remains ensuring customer business continuity.” We actively load balance as needed in addition to managing and planning for growth. If capacity constraints are required, we will first limit trials and internal workloads to prioritize the growth of existing customers.”
