Cryptocurrency miners are suspected of being behind Microsoft’s cancellation of a free two-month trial for Windows 365.
The Azure cloud-based virtual PC running Windows 10 was only on offer or a day when Microsoft said it had reached capacity. DevOps company GitLab said there has been a massive uptick in abuse of free pipeline minutes available on GitLab.com to mine cryptocurrencies.
GitLab said this created intermittent performance issues for its users.
Analysts say a free virtual PC for two months was a generous offer and the significant demand Microsoft experienced might not necessarily indicate a highly successful launch.
Those who did manage to retrieve the offer identified several problems with the service, such as versions in the wrong language and the sue of old school technologies, despite it being cloud based.
