Microsoft Azure is reportedly declining requests for cloud capacity at its UK South region, with the region allegedly maxed out.

As reported by Computer Weekly, citing comments from customers to the publication and message boards on Reddit, the issues are primarily associated with Azure virtual machines, with AMD-powered instances particularly impacted, as well as HPC and GPU-powered VMs.

One commenter alleged that they are “waiting for more capacity to come online at the end of the year,” and another said: “Terrible capacity issues in UKS. It seems to be impacting one availability zone more than others, and AMD CPUs are far more scarce. We’ve been executing a migration and have faced a number of hurdles securing quota and capacity.”

Issues during migrations have been shared, with customers told that the request was being denied by the region owner due to a lack of capacity.

Microsoft told Computer Weekly regarding the complaints: “Azure is delivered through a global network of around 80 regions worldwide, giving customers flexibility in how they deploy and scale workloads. As customer demand for Azure services in the UK remains strong, we continuously monitor and adjust how resources are allocated to ensure reliable support for existing customer workloads and maintain service availability and performance.”

While the Reddit thread focuses on UK South, some commenters have suggested capacity issues are also being experienced elsewhere, including UK West, North Europe, and some US regions.

Microsoft has, despite this, been rapidly building out its data center capacity and increasing data center leasing activity.

In Microsoft’s late January quarterly earnings call (Q2 FY2026), the company said it had spent $6.7 billion on leasing data center capacity. This was less than the prior quarter, which reached $11.1bn, but the cloud giant has committed to some $50bn in additional future leases. On the build side, Microsoft stood up 1GW of capacity in Q2 FY2026.

In the UK, the company is currently working on a data center campus in Leeds, at the Skelton Grange former power station, and is also set to build an AI supercomputer at an Nscale data center in Loughton, Essex. The BBC has previously reported that the company is also developing in Newport, near Wales, and Acton, north-west London.

The Microsoft UK South region is based in and around London with three availability zones. The region was launched in 2016, with additional availability zones being added in 2019. The company also operates UK West, which is based near Wales.

DCD has contacted Microsoft for further comment.