If you’ve been paying attention to the cryptocurrency world over the past few months, then you’ve likely seen some pretty dire headlines about Intel and AMD’s stock prices. That’s because these two companies have long dominated the market for computer chips and graphics processors—the hardware that cryptocurrency mining requires. But now, both firms are struggling with slow sales and declining profits as they fight to keep up with demand from miners who want access to their latest products. v
The company has announced that Azure cloud computing platform will no longer allow users to use its services to mine cryptocurrency.
Microsoft Cloud Services, which are owned and operated by the technology giant, will now prohibit cryptocurrency mining. This ban will affect not only Microsoft’s own services but also third-party applications hosted on Azure.
Microsoft Says No To Crypto Minning
According to a new policy update from the company, any attempt at crypto mining through their technologies could result in service suspension or termination: “Mining is not permitted within our shared cloud environments because it requires substantial resources and does not align with our business objectives for these offerings.”
Microsoft has banned cryptocurrency mining on its Azure cloud computing platform. This means that third-party applications can no longer be created for mining Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), and similar digital currencies.
Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing service, providing a collection of services for storage, networking, compute, management and more. The company offers several other services in addition to its core web hosting service, including consulting and application development platforms such as Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) or SQL Server Data Tools Service Pack 1 Update 6 Preview 2 RC1 (SSDTSP1U6RC1).
The new policy follows a similar one enacted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2017. In a blog post published that year, the company said it was not aware of any customers who were using its services to mine cryptocurrency.
While Microsoft says they are not aware of any cases where their customers have been doing this, they are banning the practice for “security reasons.” Specifically, there is concern that miners could use Azure’s computing power for nefarious purposes such as DDoS attacks on other websites or services.
