Microsoft has reversed its decision to limit free Office 365 accounts to 5GB of OneDrive storage after more than 70,000 complaints.
Customers will be required to sign up on Microsoft’s website before the end of January to keep their previous limit of 15GB.
Users who went over the new storage cap after the change won’t be charged for the additional storage, and will be offered a free one-year subscription to Office 365, including 1TB of storage.
However, Microsoft is keeping its decision scrap unlimited storage for Office 365 Home, Personal, and University subscriptions, limiting customers to 1TB.
Microsoft group program manager Douglas Pearce said in a blog post that anyone unhappy with the decision would receive a full refund.
“In November we made a business decision to reduce storage limits for OneDrive,” said Pearce.
“Since then, we’ve heard clearly from our Windows and OneDrive fans about the frustration and disappointment we have caused. We realize the announcement came across as blaming customers for using our product. For this, we are truly sorry and would like to apologize to the community.”
When the changes were announced in November, the vendor blamed “a small number of users” for exploiting the unlimited plan.
"Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings," the blog post read.
"In some instances, this exceeded 75TB per user or 14,000 times the average."
The 100GB and 200GB paid plans will also be replaced with a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month.
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