Microsoft's SkyDrive hits 250 million users

Microsoft's cloud storage platform has signed up 50 million more users since the launch of Windows 8 last October, bringing the total number up to 250m.

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The growth — announced in a Microsoft blogpost on Monday by SkyDrive program manager Omar Shahine — can be attributed in part to the integration that Windows 8 has with SkyDrive, enabling users to easily save their documents to Microsoft's cloud service. 

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it had sold more than 100m Windows 8 licenses since the launch on 25 October.  

The SkyDrive milestone comes after Microsoft took several steps to encourage more people to use the service to store content. For example, Microsoft made SkyDrive the default save location for Office files in the past few months and updated the SkyDrive iOS app.

Microsoft said on 17 April that 700m people had set up Microsoft accounts. This means approximately one third of people with Microsoft accounts are using SkyDrive to store content. 

Microsoft users may be cautious about using SkyDrive to store files in light of outages, such as the one on 12 and 13 March which left people experiencing problems when they tried to add, edit or remove files. 

SkyDrive offers 7GB of free cloud storage but charges users who wish to take out more. Meanwhile, competitors such as Google Drive and Box only offer 5GB of free storage.