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Is Microsoft’s support for Ukraine a double-edged sword?

Microsoft has spent over $100 million in providing technology support to the Ukrainian government during the Russian conflict, as recently reported by ITPro.

A week before the war began, Microsoft helped the Ukrainian government move its data from on-premises to the cloud. According to Microsoft president, Brad Smith, the company’s investment in European data centres, which has totalled $12 billion over the last two years, ultimately proved pivotal to the Ukrainian support effort.

Mr Smith commented: “In the Baltics and other countries today, governments are recognising that you are most safe when people don’t know where your data is, when you can move it at lightspeed, when you can move it across borders. We’ve provided now more that $100 million of technology support and services without asking to be paid a penny.”

However, it is believed that Microsoft’s generosity is having something of a knock-on effect to the tech giant’s ability to take on new customers who want a UK-based service. As the business is squeezed by emergency demand from the warn-torn Ukrainian authorities, it is struggling to easily expand capacity to take on more clients, as reported by the Daily Telegraph (subscription may be required).

As a Microsoft Certified Software Specialist, we have deployed literally hundreds of Microsoft 365 applications to bring cloud services, device management and security into one connected experience for our clients.

Is it a coincidence that over the last few months, we have experienced a few, very unusual issues with some Microsoft services running slow in the UK? Could the level of support being delivered to the Ukrainian government be a major contributing factor to this?

While we can’t answer these questions, we will continue to carefully monitor the situation for our clients.