Lily Huynh / The Cougar
Editor’s note: This story has been updated according to the most recent facts available.
The data stored in the UH SharePoint and OneDrive sites exceeded maximum capacity on May 31. The University community is unable to save or modify files in SharePoint or OneDrive, but Microsoft Outlook and other Office applications are still functional.
“Until service is restored, it is possible that our community may experience errors when saving or uploading files, creation of new content across Microsoft 365 services may be limited and forms and surveys through Microsoft Office and SharePoint may be unresponsive,” said a University spokesman.
The University Information Technology team is working with Microsoft Enterprise support and Microsoft management to increase UH’s storage quota and restore service.
UIT staff noticed that storage was reaching capacity on May 25. Typically, UH storage demand increases by 0.1% to 0.3%, less than a Terabyte each week, but demand jumped over 3% in the week of May 25, exceeding maximum capacity. The total amount of data stored increased by close to 50 Terabytes.
On May 31, faculty reported that they were unable to save documents to SharePoint and were met with a “quota exceeded” message.
UIT requested additional storage by Sunday afternoon on May 31, and is currently in direct conversation with Microsoft management to restore management.
As of 11:45 a.m. on June 1, UIT has confirmed that the University has acquired more storage, but that has not yet been applied to the UH allocation.
It is likely that an automated process in the Microsoft infrastructure caused the University to reach maximum capacity, not students and faculty uploading files into SharePoint or OneDrive.
UIT is still working to determine the root cause of the disruption, but plans to increase the maximum storage capacity, enable alerts to prior service disruptions and implement stronger storage management options.
As of 7:20 p.m. on June 2, SharePoint and OneDrive service have now been restored for the UH community.
This is a developing story and The Cougar will continue to report on it.
news@thedailycougar.com
