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Loop Workspace Grows to Alarming Degree
Since November 2023, I have noted details of published articles in a page in a Loop workspace. Each time an article appears, I paste the article title, extract, and URL into the page. There’s nothing particularly strange about the page as all it contains is text and the stock image at the top (Figure 1).
Originally, when I posted URLs into the page, Loop would extract a thumbnail image and include it, but that appears to have stopped sometime in mid-2025. In any case, I don’t use the file for any great purpose except to note what I have written about. I don’t use the six other pages in the workspace much either, and those pages don’t contain any massive amounts of graphic images.
Discovering a Mega Container
The Loop app creates a separate SharePoint Embedded container for every workspace. When I checked the SharePoint admin center to view active containers, I was shocked to discover that the container for the workspace had grown to 87.24 GB (Figure 2).
The screen capture was taken several days ago (two working days excluding a weekend when I don’t publish). As I write on Tuesday, the figure is 87.88 GB. In other words, adding two days’ worth of article details grew the container by 0.64 GB. That seems just a tad excessive, especially when you consider that exporting the page to PDF generates a 12.2 MB file. Another point of comparison is that the SharePoint site where I store articles hold 7,837 files (mostly Word documents) spanning 8.94 GB.
Obviously, something is going on within the Loop application to cause it to consume storage at such a rate. There is no rational reason for why a single Loop workspace should expand to become so massive.
Opening Up the Black Container Box
Although applications might find SharePoint Embedded to be a very convenient storage platform that comes with inbuilt compliance, it’s a black box for Microsoft 365 tenant administrators. The Get-SPOContainer cmdlet is OK, but it doesn’t even return the name of the owning application, meaning that you need to know the application identifier to search for containers (see this article for an example of reporting containers used for Loop workspaces).
Faced with the dilemma of a container suddenly eating expensive SharePoint Online storage at an alarming rate, apart from examining the various Loop components that make up the content of the container, there’s very little that a tenant administrator can do to investigate what could be the root cause. You could speculate that updating a Loop page every working day for the last 34 months has generated over 700 versions, but that’s unlikely to be responsible for consuming so much storage.
Nothing to Reveal Why Storage is Consumed
If the workspace content doesn’t reveal a smoking gun, the black-box combination of Loop workspaces and SharePoint Embedded containers conceals any evidence of the real cause. Administrative tools tell administrators that a container is consuming vast amounts of storage, but they provide no insight into why that storage is being consumed. Until Microsoft exposes more detailed storage metrics for SharePoint Embedded containers, administrators are left guessing.
At this point, all that can be done is report the issue to Microsoft and wait for them to reveal why a Loop workspace consumes quite so much storage.
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