Microsoft has cancelled its unlimited OneDrive storage plans enjoyed by Office 365 Home, Personal and University subscribers over excessive and unprecedented usage by beneficiaries.
The software giant offered unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers over a year ago. Earlier this year, the company offered 100GB free OneDrive storage for two years to people who signed up for the Bing Rewards Program in an attempt to take on Dropbox and Google Drive.
Microsoft has now decided to drop its unlimited OneDrive storage offer and focus on "delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users".
"Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user, or 14,000 times the average," it said in a blog post, highlighting the reason for rollback of the offer.
Under the new plan, Office 365 subscribers will get only 1TB of storage (previous limit), 100GB and 200GB paid plans will be replaced by a 50GB plan at $1.99 per month, the 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will be discontinued, and free OneDrive storage will be cut from 15GB to 5GB starting early 2016.
Office 365 subscribers who have stored in excess of 1TB will be informed of the change and be able to keep the increased storage for at least 12 months. Those not happy with the new plan will be offered prorated refunds. Users with more 5GB of free storage will continue to access the files for one year after the new plan comes into effect in early 2016, after which the 5GB level should be maintained.
The company said current customers of standalone OneDrive storage plans such as the 100GB or 200GB plans will not be not affected by these changes.
