Windows 365 sold out of computers it does not physically have
Windows 365 free trials pulled within a day after demand exhausted capacity
The market's verdict: +1.2% on MSFT in the week after.
What actually happened
When Windows 365, the Cloud PC, launched on August 2, 2021, demand blew through capacity within a day, users hit provisioning errors, and Microsoft paused the free trial on August 4. A principal product manager described the surge as an unbelievable response and compared the trial traffic to a distributed denial of service attack, which is a marketing sentence wearing an incident response hat. The cloud is infinite until the first day of sales, at which point it is a store with a queue.
This one is well documented.
Links
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Impact
- Windows Central (publication)
↳ caused by Windows 365 launch (August 2021)
Timeline
- Aug 2, 2021 Confirmed First reports came in.
- Aug 4, 2021 Fixed Trials paused after one day; restored as capacity came online.