In March 2020, Microsoft’s Azure cloud buckled under the strain of companies around the world shifting to remote work, causing service outages and forcing some customers to wait to launch and update applications. Microsoft put a positive spin on the situation, characterizing it as a temporary issue that stemmed from the surging usage of its Teams collaboration software and the rapid growth in adoption it was seeing for Azure services broadly.

But over two years later, more than two dozen Azure data centers in countries around the world are operating with limited server capacity available to customers, according to two current Microsoft managers contending with the issue and an engineer who works for a major customer. And in more than half a dozen Azure data centers—including a key one in central Washington state and others in Europe and Asia—server capacity is expected to remain limited until early next year, said one of the Microsoft managers.